EDITORIAL
Welcome to Issue 5.
I want to get away from what has been happening in the world since the last Editorial - student demos in Britain, strikes and riots in France and Greece, an uprising in Tunisia and so on and so forth. All very promising signs of what is to come. (Fingers crossed!) The fact is I have been reading the Selected Poems of Kenneth Patchen and asking myself "What does it take for a writer to become marginalised?" Patchen was a poet I remember enjoying in the 60s. And it was clear to me while reading these Selected Poems, that he is a quite extra-ordinary poet. So why hasn't he become mainstream in the way Carlos Williams, Wallace Stephens, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton, Frank O'Hara, John Ashbery, Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes, Philip Larkin, et al, have all become mainstream? (Not that I'm knocking these poets.) In many of his poems, he's just as good. I know he has won prizes and grants, but still you never hear his name mentioned alongside the others. So what is the crucial thing which divides them? Could it be the fact that he asks thorny questions about class? Another American poet who seems to have got sidelined is John Wieners. People should check him out. Black Sparrow Press do a very good Selected Poems. Of course, in Wieners' case, it would be for a different reason, I suspect, connected with another taboo. But back to Patchen. Is the treatment of the class-nature of our society one of the original sins in the bourgeois poetry set-up? The question why certain writers, who may be great writers, get marginalised is an interesting one. John Bennett, for example, whose work I have published here on many occasions. A completely unique writer in my opinion, but one who has been pushed to the margins. Is it because what he has to say has become too uncomfortable for some people? And not just any "some people", but people who 'count', people who 'matter' - ie. people who are strategically placed to influence public opinion. In an interview in The Independent a few years ago, one well-known poet mentioned the fact that he'd been airbrushed out of the picture as far as contemporary English poetry was concerned. This is what happens if you don't toe the line. Why it happens is a question I have no real answer to, and would welcome any reader's insightful contribution on the subject. (Pens at the ready, you may begin.)
On to other matters now. I apologise for the lateness of this issue. Blame Father Christmas if you will for not bringing me the material I wanted in time. Again, there has been a dearth of women writers sending work to ’Ol Chanty. Only one in this issue. Hopefully this is a defect future issues will remedy, though I’m not counting on it. All I can do is keep my fingers crossed and pray to the God of Chaos Theory to bring it about. Apart from that, there’s not much else I can say.
_____________________________________________________________________
CONTENTS
1 - POEM - Richard Jurgens
2 - QUOTE - Friedrich Nietzsche
3 - POEMS - A. D. Winans
4 - POEMS - David Waddilove
5 - ESSAY - Richard Livermore
6 - POEMS - A. K. Whitehead
7 - SHARD - John Bennett
8 - POEMS - George Held
9 - POEMS - Nina Zivancevic
10 - REVIEW - Thomas Ország-Land
___________________________________________________________________________________________
2 - QUOTE - Friedrich Nietzsche
3 - POEMS - A. D. Winans
4 - POEMS - David Waddilove
5 - ESSAY - Richard Livermore
6 - POEMS - A. K. Whitehead
7 - SHARD - John Bennett
8 - POEMS - George Held
9 - POEMS - Nina Zivancevic
10 - REVIEW - Thomas Ország-Land
___________________________________________________________________________________________
POEM - Richard Jurgens
HOWL - Part One (A South African translation)
We saw the best minds of our generation destroyed by otherness in a land built by others,
drifting in forbidden streets in search of a job or to score,
demon-headed hard skool hippies burning with the spirit of unholy freedom,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat smoking white pipes in the supernatural
warm sunlight of run-down Mayfair backyards to the rhythms of Jamaica,
who bared their breasts to Heaven under the Southern Cross and saw the strangest creatures in
the spiritual desert,
who passed through universities with open lying eyes hallucinating the calm peace of the Free
State and epic tragedies among the enemies of love,
who were admitted to the academies on pain of sufferance judged crazy & expelled for
gulping tear gas & sewing seashells on their brand-new togas,
who shivered in borrowed rooms in greying underjocks, clinking the coins on the bedside
table & listening for the nearing sirens of the Terror,
who got busted with five seeds returning from the Berg & did six months hard & came out
speaking a hard language & smoking harder,
who shared cold dawns with the lost souls who live in the alley of the Blue Flame, death, or
purgatoried their torsos night after night with dreams, with drugs, with waking
nightmares, alcohol and the plentiful cunt of the road,
invisible light, streets of peerless day and sudden summer storms in the mind leaping toward
poles of Linksfield Ridge & California, shadowing the world in its eternal motion
before or since,
acid certainties of lecture halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over
the rooftops, rich suburbs in the cracked headlights of dopehead neon joyrides, robot
on the blink sun and moon and tree vibrations in the cutting winter Hillbrow dusks,
rubbish bin rants and kind king light of mind,
who hitched a thousand miles through scrubby desert and rolling farmlands to play the Black
Sun fuelled on speed and anticipations of a spectacular sunrise until the noise of cars
and school-going children brought them down spinning wordless and battered bleak of
brain all drained of brilliance down to the cold grey streets of shabby Yeoville,
who sank all night in submarine light of Jameson's floated out and sat through the stale beer
afternoon in dusty downtown hotels listening to music & lies on the crackling radio,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to bar to the Springs Hotel to museum to
the shunting yards to someone’s pozi, lost legion of philosophers of life jumping down
the pavements off fire escapes off windowsills off Carlton Centre out of the moon,
yackety-yacking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and
eyeball shots and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for
the Lucky Ones cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Swaziland African Zen of mountains leaving a trail of ambiguous
picture postcards of exotic Lourenco Marques, where they made a killing on night-
time beaches dropping live bullets in the communal fire to scare the mindless tourists
and separate them from their costly gear,
who, with money to spend, got hooked again, suffered Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-
grindings and mindfucks for Africa under junk-withdrawal in Doornfontein’s bare
unfurnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the stark light of Park Station wondering
where to go, and who with, and went, leaving few broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in bakkies bakkies bakkies racketing along dust roads toward lonesome
farms in grandfather night,
who studied Marvell Comix and Lenin and Bob Dylan and Oz as Bible because the cosmos
instinctively vibrates below deep mining towns,
who off-roaded in the hot hills around the river Kei in search of visionary doctors of the tribes
who were visionary doctors of the tribes,
who saw their warriors go mad before the battle they could not fight,
who jumped in passing cars with okes with black tear-drops on their cheeks on the impulse of
summer sunlight and Valiant rear-view mirrors, & were indulged politely as too
impossibly ignorant to corrupt,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Highpoint seeking heavy rock or sex or
shwarma, and followed the existential Greek philosopher to converse about Africa
and Eternity, a hopeless task, and dreamed of taking flight to Europe or America,
who reappeared on the campuses as radicals in beards and sandals with big Christ-like eyes
sexy in the poverty of their pale skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,
who had cigarette holes burned in their arms in the narcotic tobacco haze of the shadowed
backrooms of Capitalism,
who distributed Freedom Charter pamphlets in the immense & crowded stadia of the angry
poor as the sirens of the state wailed them down, and wailed down their walls, and the
early-morning hymns wailed in the cells of the hanging prison,
who broke down in anxious tears in school gymnasiums naked and trembling before the daily
machinery of life & death,
who spouted chapter and verse through sheer naked cowardice when taken into the labyrinth
from which none returned unchanged, and some not at all, for everyone was horribly
flawed and knew it,
who howled on the threshold of revelation dragging in to the day’s pointless graft with
tired genitals and bent paperbacks,
who fucked each other’s girlfriends on the turn, so everyone got theirs and no one got airs,
who moved in testosterone-fuelled packs of comrades intent on trouble and mayhem,
who fucked in the morning in the evenings in rose gardens and toilet cubicles and in wild wild
nature, scattering semen freely to whomever come who may,
who rattled off acronyms like rounds of automatic fire endlessly trying to save souls but
wound up sobbing for the real hero and the dog left dead on the doorstep,
who lost loves to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the quick buck the
one eyed shrew who winks from the womb and one-eyed She who does nothing all day
but sit around snipping the intellectual rainbow threads of the knitting machine,
who went cruising for girls in Germiston in myriad stolen night-cars, sweetened the snatches
of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but
prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked
in the lake,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes
a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and
ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last
loose sperm of consciousness,
who, like N.J., secret hero of this poem, golden goy of the gentle suburbs to the memory of
his innumerable fucks with chicks in cars & restaurant conveniences, the smelly
bioscope back seats, on beaches in caves or with pale music groupies in familiar lonely
roadside skirt upliftings & especially secret sports club solipsisms of toilets, &
nightclub alleys too,
who faded out in unseen private movies, were shifted in dreams, woke in a desert, and picked
themselves up out of ditches with heartless brandy and horrors of Eloff Street’s lacy
dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with shoes full of blood on the icy pavements waiting for a door
into the barred Administration offices to open to a shaft full of the heat of the earth and
the crash of drills and men’s sweat,
who created great suicidal dramas in decaying art deco apartments while in the streets crowds
clashed with cops under the sun’s enormous objective floodlight & their heads shall be
crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the leftovers of an inherited imagination and found they did not taste like food,
who jived to the beat of the streets with their radios and pushcarts full of onions and dried
meat,
who waited in dark basement flats with rubbish piling up around them after the failures of
mentors and rose up to the indignity of daily work,
who coughed in the shacks of Alexandria crowned with flame under the tubercular sky
surrounded by the empty orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow
morning were stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked the offal of poverty feet head a.k.a. chicken walkie-talkie & pap and
sauce dreaming of fast food and cool shopping malls,
who walked the echoing streets of the night ghetto and felt at home,
who threw their watches into the communal pot and saw them transformed into the
molten lava of the Absolute Moment, & sirens screamed in the streets every day for
the next decade,
who grew up with the ghosts of the past rattling in the old family cupboard, and left home to
escape them though the ghosts continued to rattle,
who journeyed to Valhalla, who died in Valhalla, who came back to Valhalla & waited in
vain, who watched over Valhalla & brooded & alone in Valhalla and finally went away
to find out the Time, & now Valhalla yearns for her dead heroes,
who burned alive one day in their innocent blue jackets in a sidestreet in Dube amid
waves of happy chanting & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion &
the laconic drawls of the goons of advertising & the thick black eyebrows of the
religious uncles of the Censor’s Office, or were run down by the crowded minivans of
a gangster reality,
who walked into hospital with an axe blade in the head this actually happened and walked
away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Soweto dust street ways & police
cars slowly cruising, not even one free beer,
who shouted from windows in despair, fell off the rickety township train, slipped from the
tenth-floor showers of the police state, ran amok on farm chain gangs, bled all over the
street, danced on broken Black Label bottles smashed records of the music of
apocalypse finished the Jack and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in
their ears and the blast of the early morning train whistle,
who sped down the wide empty highways of the Emergency journeying to each other's back
garden servant’s jail-solitude rooms to dance with the African Jazz Pioneers,
who drove all day and night hallucinating giant brown lions in the desert to arrive on the day
John Lennon died, may Time engulf in darkness the stupid fuck who killed him,
who fell on their knees in drought-stricken parks praying for a moment of history
and light and breasts, until the moon illuminated the relentless night,
who flipped in the holding cells with born criminals who wore the ink of reality on their skins
and sang the song of the redeeming machine gun,
who retired to a shed in the wilderness to kick a habit, or the mountains to drink stolen
champagne or Cape Town for girls or boys or De Aar to the black locomotive or
Stellenbosch to Oedipus to Groendakkies to the daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their
strange sanity & hands behind the iron bars of freedom,
who threw smoke bombs at distinguished lecturers for breaking the ranks of silence and
subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of Senate House with
bandaged heads and much bravado, demanding the end of the state of hate,
and who were given instead a concrete interrogation cell the seatless chair the narrow brick
the Coke bottles full of sand that caused bruises too deep to see the fizzing shock
machine & the long black sleepless tunnel,
who in humourless protest overturned the cycle of day & night and took flight in catatonia,
returning years later truly stretched tight on the skeleton, and tears and fingers, to the
visible mad man doom of the prison survivor,
the foetid halls of the technical schools, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and
rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, a nightmare life, bodies
turned to stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother & father dead in the bed of their mute conspiracy, and the last textbook flung out
of the car window, and the last drive along the silent night-time street and the last
long-distance coded conversation and the furniture left in place, as if returning
tomorrow, with milk in the fridge and cups still in the cupboard, all too real but gone
now, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination
ah, Rocklin, because you are gone I am not truly here, I bet you’re running up a tab in the
Blue Pelican right now laughing with the Congolese gangsters of your other world
who therefore disappeared into the vortex leaving behind nothing but the shadow of phone
bills like Ulysses and the piss & vomit of true poetry scattered in colonial stone
fireplaces,
who took the bus up north to swim the crocodile river obsessed with the sudden flashes of
cameras the quick mental sidestep the document the passport & the future plane,
their mission to rediscover the syntax and measure of human experience and speak
before the world drunk and shining with anger, rejecting yet confessing from the soul
to an absurd love for the native soil,
and who crossed the Absolute Border to make incarnate gaps in Time & Space in
images that lived only in a single fevered brain, and trapped the archangel of the soul
between a guilty past and a cruel future and mildly expected to join the dots of life at
the point where consciousness and sensation take their jump into the bottomless lake
and rose instead reincarnate in the invisible clothes of a world where the streets have no name
and turned the suffering of the country’s naked need for love into Mannenberg laments
that shivered the cities down to the last radio,
the madman refugee and angel of lost Time, unwitting, yet finding comrades in a
strange asylum,
and every man jack an incomparable poet.
HOWL - Part One (A South African translation)
We saw the best minds of our generation destroyed by otherness in a land built by others,
drifting in forbidden streets in search of a job or to score,
demon-headed hard skool hippies burning with the spirit of unholy freedom,
who poverty and tatters and hollow-eyed and high sat smoking white pipes in the supernatural
warm sunlight of run-down Mayfair backyards to the rhythms of Jamaica,
who bared their breasts to Heaven under the Southern Cross and saw the strangest creatures in
the spiritual desert,
who passed through universities with open lying eyes hallucinating the calm peace of the Free
State and epic tragedies among the enemies of love,
who were admitted to the academies on pain of sufferance judged crazy & expelled for
gulping tear gas & sewing seashells on their brand-new togas,
who shivered in borrowed rooms in greying underjocks, clinking the coins on the bedside
table & listening for the nearing sirens of the Terror,
who got busted with five seeds returning from the Berg & did six months hard & came out
speaking a hard language & smoking harder,
who shared cold dawns with the lost souls who live in the alley of the Blue Flame, death, or
purgatoried their torsos night after night with dreams, with drugs, with waking
nightmares, alcohol and the plentiful cunt of the road,
invisible light, streets of peerless day and sudden summer storms in the mind leaping toward
poles of Linksfield Ridge & California, shadowing the world in its eternal motion
before or since,
acid certainties of lecture halls, backyard green tree cemetery dawns, wine drunkenness over
the rooftops, rich suburbs in the cracked headlights of dopehead neon joyrides, robot
on the blink sun and moon and tree vibrations in the cutting winter Hillbrow dusks,
rubbish bin rants and kind king light of mind,
who hitched a thousand miles through scrubby desert and rolling farmlands to play the Black
Sun fuelled on speed and anticipations of a spectacular sunrise until the noise of cars
and school-going children brought them down spinning wordless and battered bleak of
brain all drained of brilliance down to the cold grey streets of shabby Yeoville,
who sank all night in submarine light of Jameson's floated out and sat through the stale beer
afternoon in dusty downtown hotels listening to music & lies on the crackling radio,
who talked continuously seventy hours from park to bar to the Springs Hotel to museum to
the shunting yards to someone’s pozi, lost legion of philosophers of life jumping down
the pavements off fire escapes off windowsills off Carlton Centre out of the moon,
yackety-yacking screaming vomiting whispering facts and memories and anecdotes and
eyeball shots and shocks of hospitals and jails and wars,
whole intellects disgorged in total recall for seven days and nights with brilliant eyes, meat for
the Lucky Ones cast on the pavement,
who vanished into nowhere Swaziland African Zen of mountains leaving a trail of ambiguous
picture postcards of exotic Lourenco Marques, where they made a killing on night-
time beaches dropping live bullets in the communal fire to scare the mindless tourists
and separate them from their costly gear,
who, with money to spend, got hooked again, suffered Eastern sweats and Tangerian bone-
grindings and mindfucks for Africa under junk-withdrawal in Doornfontein’s bare
unfurnished room,
who wandered around and around at midnight in the stark light of Park Station wondering
where to go, and who with, and went, leaving few broken hearts,
who lit cigarettes in bakkies bakkies bakkies racketing along dust roads toward lonesome
farms in grandfather night,
who studied Marvell Comix and Lenin and Bob Dylan and Oz as Bible because the cosmos
instinctively vibrates below deep mining towns,
who off-roaded in the hot hills around the river Kei in search of visionary doctors of the tribes
who were visionary doctors of the tribes,
who saw their warriors go mad before the battle they could not fight,
who jumped in passing cars with okes with black tear-drops on their cheeks on the impulse of
summer sunlight and Valiant rear-view mirrors, & were indulged politely as too
impossibly ignorant to corrupt,
who lounged hungry and lonesome through Highpoint seeking heavy rock or sex or
shwarma, and followed the existential Greek philosopher to converse about Africa
and Eternity, a hopeless task, and dreamed of taking flight to Europe or America,
who reappeared on the campuses as radicals in beards and sandals with big Christ-like eyes
sexy in the poverty of their pale skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets,
who had cigarette holes burned in their arms in the narcotic tobacco haze of the shadowed
backrooms of Capitalism,
who distributed Freedom Charter pamphlets in the immense & crowded stadia of the angry
poor as the sirens of the state wailed them down, and wailed down their walls, and the
early-morning hymns wailed in the cells of the hanging prison,
who broke down in anxious tears in school gymnasiums naked and trembling before the daily
machinery of life & death,
who spouted chapter and verse through sheer naked cowardice when taken into the labyrinth
from which none returned unchanged, and some not at all, for everyone was horribly
flawed and knew it,
who howled on the threshold of revelation dragging in to the day’s pointless graft with
tired genitals and bent paperbacks,
who fucked each other’s girlfriends on the turn, so everyone got theirs and no one got airs,
who moved in testosterone-fuelled packs of comrades intent on trouble and mayhem,
who fucked in the morning in the evenings in rose gardens and toilet cubicles and in wild wild
nature, scattering semen freely to whomever come who may,
who rattled off acronyms like rounds of automatic fire endlessly trying to save souls but
wound up sobbing for the real hero and the dog left dead on the doorstep,
who lost loves to the three old shrews of fate the one eyed shrew of the quick buck the
one eyed shrew who winks from the womb and one-eyed She who does nothing all day
but sit around snipping the intellectual rainbow threads of the knitting machine,
who went cruising for girls in Germiston in myriad stolen night-cars, sweetened the snatches
of a million girls trembling in the sunset, and were red eyed in the morning but
prepared to sweeten the snatch of the sunrise, flashing buttocks under barns and naked
in the lake,
who copulated ecstatic and insatiate with a bottle of beer a sweetheart a package of cigarettes
a candle and fell off the bed, and continued along the floor and down the hall and
ended fainting on the wall with a vision of ultimate cunt and come eluding the last
loose sperm of consciousness,
who, like N.J., secret hero of this poem, golden goy of the gentle suburbs to the memory of
his innumerable fucks with chicks in cars & restaurant conveniences, the smelly
bioscope back seats, on beaches in caves or with pale music groupies in familiar lonely
roadside skirt upliftings & especially secret sports club solipsisms of toilets, &
nightclub alleys too,
who faded out in unseen private movies, were shifted in dreams, woke in a desert, and picked
themselves up out of ditches with heartless brandy and horrors of Eloff Street’s lacy
dreams & stumbled to unemployment offices,
who walked all night with shoes full of blood on the icy pavements waiting for a door
into the barred Administration offices to open to a shaft full of the heat of the earth and
the crash of drills and men’s sweat,
who created great suicidal dramas in decaying art deco apartments while in the streets crowds
clashed with cops under the sun’s enormous objective floodlight & their heads shall be
crowned with laurel in oblivion,
who ate the leftovers of an inherited imagination and found they did not taste like food,
who jived to the beat of the streets with their radios and pushcarts full of onions and dried
meat,
who waited in dark basement flats with rubbish piling up around them after the failures of
mentors and rose up to the indignity of daily work,
who coughed in the shacks of Alexandria crowned with flame under the tubercular sky
surrounded by the empty orange crates of theology,
who scribbled all night rocking and rolling over lofty incantations which in the yellow
morning were stanzas of gibberish,
who cooked the offal of poverty feet head a.k.a. chicken walkie-talkie & pap and
sauce dreaming of fast food and cool shopping malls,
who walked the echoing streets of the night ghetto and felt at home,
who threw their watches into the communal pot and saw them transformed into the
molten lava of the Absolute Moment, & sirens screamed in the streets every day for
the next decade,
who grew up with the ghosts of the past rattling in the old family cupboard, and left home to
escape them though the ghosts continued to rattle,
who journeyed to Valhalla, who died in Valhalla, who came back to Valhalla & waited in
vain, who watched over Valhalla & brooded & alone in Valhalla and finally went away
to find out the Time, & now Valhalla yearns for her dead heroes,
who burned alive one day in their innocent blue jackets in a sidestreet in Dube amid
waves of happy chanting & the tanked-up clatter of the iron regiments of fashion &
the laconic drawls of the goons of advertising & the thick black eyebrows of the
religious uncles of the Censor’s Office, or were run down by the crowded minivans of
a gangster reality,
who walked into hospital with an axe blade in the head this actually happened and walked
away unknown and forgotten into the ghostly daze of Soweto dust street ways & police
cars slowly cruising, not even one free beer,
who shouted from windows in despair, fell off the rickety township train, slipped from the
tenth-floor showers of the police state, ran amok on farm chain gangs, bled all over the
street, danced on broken Black Label bottles smashed records of the music of
apocalypse finished the Jack and threw up groaning into the bloody toilet, moans in
their ears and the blast of the early morning train whistle,
who sped down the wide empty highways of the Emergency journeying to each other's back
garden servant’s jail-solitude rooms to dance with the African Jazz Pioneers,
who drove all day and night hallucinating giant brown lions in the desert to arrive on the day
John Lennon died, may Time engulf in darkness the stupid fuck who killed him,
who fell on their knees in drought-stricken parks praying for a moment of history
and light and breasts, until the moon illuminated the relentless night,
who flipped in the holding cells with born criminals who wore the ink of reality on their skins
and sang the song of the redeeming machine gun,
who retired to a shed in the wilderness to kick a habit, or the mountains to drink stolen
champagne or Cape Town for girls or boys or De Aar to the black locomotive or
Stellenbosch to Oedipus to Groendakkies to the daisychain or grave,
who demanded sanity trials accusing the radio of hypnotism & were left with their
strange sanity & hands behind the iron bars of freedom,
who threw smoke bombs at distinguished lecturers for breaking the ranks of silence and
subsequently presented themselves on the granite steps of Senate House with
bandaged heads and much bravado, demanding the end of the state of hate,
and who were given instead a concrete interrogation cell the seatless chair the narrow brick
the Coke bottles full of sand that caused bruises too deep to see the fizzing shock
machine & the long black sleepless tunnel,
who in humourless protest overturned the cycle of day & night and took flight in catatonia,
returning years later truly stretched tight on the skeleton, and tears and fingers, to the
visible mad man doom of the prison survivor,
the foetid halls of the technical schools, bickering with the echoes of the soul, rocking and
rolling in the midnight solitude-bench dolmen-realms of love, a nightmare life, bodies
turned to stone as heavy as the moon,
with mother & father dead in the bed of their mute conspiracy, and the last textbook flung out
of the car window, and the last drive along the silent night-time street and the last
long-distance coded conversation and the furniture left in place, as if returning
tomorrow, with milk in the fridge and cups still in the cupboard, all too real but gone
now, nothing but a hopeful little bit of hallucination
ah, Rocklin, because you are gone I am not truly here, I bet you’re running up a tab in the
Blue Pelican right now laughing with the Congolese gangsters of your other world
who therefore disappeared into the vortex leaving behind nothing but the shadow of phone
bills like Ulysses and the piss & vomit of true poetry scattered in colonial stone
fireplaces,
who took the bus up north to swim the crocodile river obsessed with the sudden flashes of
cameras the quick mental sidestep the document the passport & the future plane,
their mission to rediscover the syntax and measure of human experience and speak
before the world drunk and shining with anger, rejecting yet confessing from the soul
to an absurd love for the native soil,
and who crossed the Absolute Border to make incarnate gaps in Time & Space in
images that lived only in a single fevered brain, and trapped the archangel of the soul
between a guilty past and a cruel future and mildly expected to join the dots of life at
the point where consciousness and sensation take their jump into the bottomless lake
and rose instead reincarnate in the invisible clothes of a world where the streets have no name
and turned the suffering of the country’s naked need for love into Mannenberg laments
that shivered the cities down to the last radio,
the madman refugee and angel of lost Time, unwitting, yet finding comrades in a
strange asylum,
and every man jack an incomparable poet.
QUOTE - Friedrich Nietzsche
"One must still have chaos within, in order to give birth to a dancing star."
________________________________________________________________________________________________
POEMS - A. D. Winans
Poem For The Poet Waiting On Fame
Don't get up in the morning
Pissed-off bent out of shape
Defeated and fatigued
Don't kick your dog
A can is okay
Don't look for trouble
A fist in the face
Won't change history
Don't spit into the wind
It might come back at you
Never place your hand
Over your heart the
Marksman might think
You're marking his target
Don't fight the poem the
Typewriter is never wrong
Accept the inevitable
And maybe it won't come
Until next week next month next year
Maybe never
Remember there isn't anything
Wrong with being a mechanic
A cab driver a pimp a whore
Be glad you have two hands
Two feet two eyes two ears
One of the latter is okay
If your name is Van Gogh
Go easy go slow
Or life will pass you by
Like an aging conductor
Without a train
Leaving you feeling
Like a comic without applause
Know this above all else
Seven out of ten poets are bores
And two of the other three
Literary Whores
Support that odd one
He or She needs you
And you need him
More than either of you
Will ever know
Poem For My Mother
My mother’s eyes stare at me
Like a wounded doe
Looking into a rifle barrel
The months grow antlers
The years fangs
Time a barbed wire fence
Tears at the soul
Her smile fading
Like watercolors off
A worn canvas
The shadow of my ancestors
Stalking my dreams
Like an aging warrior
Tracking game
My mother’s eyes smoldering
Like hot ashes
In a Hiroshima graveyard
_________________________________________________________________
POEMS - David Waddilove
Dawning
the night is
long tunes
play in the mind
accustomed
tunes and snatches of
time stolen or anyway
misappropriated
much
is grasped in
darkness the warrior
returning grasps for
a sword to
decapitate
the night
Trees
this one got pollarded
foreshortened a few
grim shoots from
branches long
dead
and this one’s a bonsai roots
constricted miniature
enclosed
never to spread unseemly
the loggers came for
that one a nail in
the bark to mark
the execution
Detourne
scavenger city replete
with the dessication of
dream the risk and
opportunity of a fertile
grime
we clean away
on the bench the old men
come and go drinking tennents
extra in order to show
the death-suited how
death may be re-enacted
regularly
the species
lives and dies by
repetition
wars dreams
and more wars
we carry the shabti within
purely ourselves and the
purity ensures
enslavement
making models to carry
to the temple designing
the future paradises
to enact them
in oceans of blood
stumbling godless yet
fallen unchallenged stumbling among
noise of the heart’s
industrial repetition dodge
that traffic!
buying and
selling the trinkets to
store against what imagined
ruin what presumed
authenticity
the check out man says
his rating has improved he
will not now be
redundant just
quicker
the spin
cycle throbs with
pained and mechanised
tempo
it is the
velocity of immolation
traffic of pace and
non-existence
the celandines grow
in the cracks the
pigeon sits circumspect
under the arch
they are unobserved self
preoccupied not referenced
the women in pencil
skirts issue from solicitors
tripping in haste and heels
and out of the heart’s
intention the city is
burnished
the homeless
sleep in the forecourts of
charity shops
the windows
boarded the benches
gone
the public
space confined to
shopping
aristotle strolls
the malls but finds no
conversation
we have
become ourselves product
ego and
dissipation
if the city were legible
would we know
the bridgeways out?
the rootless return
who bars the gateway?
who blocks the temple
doors with unguents and
the violent curse?
who faces
the rootless down who
refuses admittance at
the borders? who
is keeper of secrets who
enforcer of privacy? who
are the temple guards and
what are their names their
names in life that
is? who pays for
blockage? who
ensures the exile remains
exile?
it is not in
the face of Osiris
possible
to lie
the heart in
the scales the balance of
a feather
those who have
invaded the lower lands will
have to justify their very
old gods
he who dares
not speak truth will be
rifled the body parts
will reassemble in some
swamp and remain unfound
discarnate
these are the
rules of the land of the
dead fear
them for they
are ruthless
in tone and voice and
will bar any further
incarnations
leaving them rootless as
once others too were
made
homeless
_____________________________________________________________________
ESSAY
SOME THOUGHTS AFTER VALERY
Richard Livermore
SOME THOUGHTS AFTER VALERY
Richard Livermore
"Poetry is a formation by the body and mind in creative union of that which suits this union and excites and reinforces it.” P. Valery
I have often asked myself what it is that constitutes the ‘essence’ of poetry. I know it’s a complex question but I must admit that each time I ask myself I invariably come back to the idea that of all the ‘arts of the word’, poetry is the most physical. Not only that, but the most directly physical aspect of poetry is connected to sound. Other aspects of poetry, like images, metaphors and suchlike are only indirectly physical in that they depend on the mental medium of the imagination rather than the physical medium connected to the actual concrete sounds of words in a poem.
Yet I also know that it is impossible to split poetry up in this way, that poetry doesn’t just consist of the relations of sounds to each other - like music - but has all sorts of other ‘components’, of which meaning, image, metaphor, metonymy and so on are just a few. Paul Valery used the analogy of the pendulum in the grandfather clock swinging from side to side to convey this idea more concisely. On the one side he placed “form: the rhythm, accent, tone, movement— in a word the Voice in action.” and on the other he placed content, “all significant values, images and ideas, stimulae of feeling and memory, virtual impulses and structures of understanding.” (I place on this side images, metaphors, metonyms, ambiguities, puns, double-entendres, amphibolies, synecdoches and so on, not to mention the surreal, snatches of the irrational and other free-floating elements which don’t necessarily have meaning, but are nonetheless part of a whole in which even the meaningless can become meaningful - at least in poetry.) The important thing for Valery, as for me, is the way one extreme of pendulum echoes the other, that is to say how sound and sense dynamically reinforce one another.
Paul Valery also said “Poetry can be recognised by this property, that it tends to get itself reproduced in its own form; it stimulates us to reconstruct it identically.” What Valery is getting at here is the fact that poetry bears repetition because it is memorable, and it is memorable because the sound and shape of its words are pleasurable and pleasurable experiences are those we seek to repeat. Of course, the sense and meaning, the way images jell - or jar - and so on and so forth are vital elements of this experience, but they are elements which would no more stand on their own than sound would stand on its own. In other words, it is both working together which makes for the pleasure, not the one divorced from the other.
So it comes down to this in the end, that poetry is both physical and mental at the same time, that it consists of the fusion of sound on the one side and sense on the other. Mallarme once said that poetry was made up of words not ideas and it is very easy to see his point, although perhaps it is a little one-sided. The pleasurable frisson poetry generates consists in the successful mating of form and content or sound and sense; it is akin, therefore, to a good mutual orgasm between two separate people in which both parties reach orgasm at the same time, making them ‘one person’ for as long as the orgasm lasts. Some people will baulk at seeing poetry in these sexual terms, in terms of “jouissance”, but I cannot think of a more appropriate metaphor - since a good orgasm is something we all like to repeat.
Valery also used the phrase “Voice in action”. Voices convey intentions and feelings. They don’t exist in isolation from the uses to which they are put. Valery’s Voice in action implies that it is the voice which bridges the two sides of the ‘poetic pendulum’, that it doesn’t just sit there limply, but is a vehicle for expressing the sense of the poem by means of the sound. He was therefore very clear about the priority of the voice in poetry. “But, in fact, who speaks in a poem? Mallarme claimed it was language itself. For me, it would be living and thinking being, driving self-awareness to the capture of sensibility - developing resonances, symmetries, etc. on the vocal chords. In sum, language coming from the voice rather than the voice from language.”
But one must also be careful not to make this side too important either. Basil Bunting, I think, was guilty of this. He once wrote, “Poetry, like music, is to be heard. It deals in sounds— long sounds and short sounds, heavy beats and light beats, the tone relation of vowels, the relations of consonants to one another, which are like instrumental colour in music. Poetry lies dead on the page until some voice brings it to life, just as music on the stave is no more than instructions to a player.” Bunting was a musical journalist, I believe, and was perhaps therefore bound to view poetry in these musical terms. But he is overstating his case, I believe. Poetry is not music. Music is all about the relations of sounds to each other and the musician must become acutely conscious of these relations in the act of composition. The sound elements in poetry are more unconscious, because the conscious focus is elsewhere. Music, by itself, does not generate meanings; poetry does. And for this reason the analogy fails. On the other hand, poetry does have a physical side which relates it to music, but the focus of a poem, its conscious focus, is not on music but meaning, and where ‘music’ enters a poem, it is on a largely unconscious basis. In fact, the best musical effects in poetry are often completely unconscious and where the musical element is consciously cultivated, it is often at the expense of the poem as a poem and, all too often, can seem quite contrived.
Getting back to Valery, he once compared poetry to dance and prose to walking from A to B. In prose, he said, the point was to get to the end of what you have read and understand it. Once you have read it and ‘got it’, you can throw it away. In other words, prose is just a means to an end which is outside it. Poetry isn’t. “Everything verbal is provisional. All language is a means. Poetry tries to make it an end.” In poetry the means and end are identical, for the point of a poem is not just what it means but also the physical pleasure it gives. OK, so it’s not a pure physical pleasure, because meaning is involved, but it is a meaning tied up with that physical pleasure, not as an end external to it. The point of dancing is the pleasure of engaging in certain physical movements for their own sake. What better way of describing a poem in which whatever meaning or meanings there are serve the end of the poem and the pleasure to be derived from it in a physical sense. Meaning or meanings assume a physical form in poetry, which they would not otherwise have, and it is the physical form which meaning acquires in a poem which is the point of the poem, not the meaning itself. This fusion in fact is of the ‘essence’ of poetry.
I’ve written enough I think to convey what I think is the ‘essence’ of poetry, that it is not simply a mental production, but a physical one as well. And those two aspects go hand in hand. Like a human being, a poem is embodied and it is very easy to forget this. (A lot of contemporary poets do.) In the past, this embodiment was often narrowly conceived in terms of certain traditional forms and techniques - the sonnet, the villanelle, rhyme, metre, et cetera. William Carlos Williams - “normally full of nothing more than the thingyness of things” as a friend of mine puts it - spoke of the “fascist sonnet”, but that’s stretching the point I believe. Valery once wrote, “Stanzas and rhymes break the tendency to go the shortest way to reach the end - that is to say prose.” (“The ball must not fall to the ground.”), which means that he obviously thought formal techniques had a definite place in poetry. Personally, I would modify that and say that in poetry there is an unconscious principle of organisation which raises it above chopped up prose, and this unconscious principle of organisation is not just mental, it is also physical. The important thing is not that a poem is written in this or that form - for I receive a lot of rhyming poetry which is execrable - but that, in whatever form it comes in, it has both physical and mental aspects which re-inforce one another and it is the fusion of both of these aspects together that finally makes it a poem.
_____________________________________________________________________
POEMS - A. C. Whitehead
Errors
Had we seen him it would have been different.
We would not have set the trap to catch what
we had heard: the loud scrattings which recurred
from time to time, as if trying to climb
the inner wall, or seeking to install
itself somewhere into a lair beneath
the floor, scratching with every tooth and claw.
So we delicately placed below a
shelf a trap with cheese upon the loose flap
and next morning found results of the spring:
what had been a beautiful doormouse, squat
and ugly in death, its neck fanned outwards,
blood around his mouth and staining the wood.
Drifting
The years drift by
like ending notes
on a windy
day. Each one floats
somewhere and I
am loath to sing,
to pray, to ask why;
they do not cling
but are empty,
fainter and fainter
and blown away
in a transfer
of all I do
and say, do not
do and say, new,
old, cold or hot.
Options
He spent his life in the unbent
certainty of unknowing.
never molesting a request,
never having sought endeavour
nor kicked, nor thumped, nor considered
how what all thought inevitable
permits the unsuspected.
Secretly he enjoyed the debt,
the chill dependability
of uncertainty. Thus flirting,
it became the acclaimed country
of his adoption, the top hills
and clouds expanding to shield him
from sun, the forest promising
protection from revelations
of light and what shadows disclose,
its rivers affirmatively
smashing with panache down gorges
with the invincible message
of a committed gravity.
Predators
Spectacles? We have checked and lived on them
before the eleventh of September
to the rehearsed Olympic open burst,
or wherever we can grovel to gnaw
when reputations putrify and rot
in court or on the streets where we distort
a carcass of the dead and yark them all
around the globe, confound the innocent
or guilty -- never torn between the two
but tearing at them both and slurring truth,
feeding on what was life and heeding none
or claiming public appetite as game --
and so it is, or we would have no wing
to lower in the swoop, nor beak to show
the whitened bones of victims we have owned.
__________________________________________________
SHARD - John Bennett
Prerequisites
She dreamed she was Cleopatra. She got herself a rowboat and rowed around the shore of her daddy's private lake. She stayed out of deep water but was still in over her head. Already. At age six. She ate chocolate non-stop and kept hoping Anthony would leave Rome and save her. She grew fat and graduated from grade school. In high school she took a drink and woke up in a bad part of town. She repeated the process enhanced by cocaine right into her senior year. By that time the boys had grown bored with her and even daddy stopped tucking her in at night. She graduated. She turned street legal and cashed in her inheritance. Took speed, trimmed down, flew to Egypt. Rented a cruise ship and sailed the Nile draped in gold and silver, emeralds and turquoise. And then the money ran out. She rode Greyhound from city to city, became a truck-stop mama, milked A.A. and N.A. for all they were worth. Six treatment centers, nine county jails, three shrinks and a handful of counselors later, she hit bottom. She went back to school. Got her own shrink credentials. Settled down in a plush L.A. office and tapped the eraser-end of a #2 pencil on her desktop, waiting for the first paying customer to step thru the door.
_____________________________________________________________________
POEMS - George Held
A Rejoynder
Nora Barnacle once complained about her husband James Joyce’s late hours, “I can’t sleep anymore … I go to bed and then that man sits in the next room and continues laughing about his own writing. And then I knock at the door, and I say, now Jim, stop writing or stop laughing.”
The wife’s given an ultimatum:
“Quit writing or quit laughing.”
Might as well say, “Quit living”
Writing’s Jim’s desideratum.
Wm. Blake
27 Broad St.
London, England
A Poison Tree
I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
And I watered it in fears
Night and morning with my tears,
And I sunned it with smiles
And with soft deceitful wiles.
And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright,
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine, --
And into my garden stole
When the night had veiled the pole;
In the morning, glad, I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.
Dear Mr. Blake:
Thank you for your submission. Unfortunately, we do not publish rhyming verse. However, we like the suggestion of a narrative in "Poison Tree" and want to encourage you to consider revision and possible resubmission. Try rewriting in the third person and give the main character and his foe names, like Vinnie and Judas, and lose the rhymes. For instance, you could replace "pole" with "sky" and add the benefit of removing a word that might lift our censors' eyebrows.
Think it over. We pride ourselves on our willingness to work with our contributors.
Best wishes with your (free verse) writing.
Prue Callow, Poetry Editor, The Ashbery Review
___________________________________________________________________________________________
POEMS - Nina Zivancevic
Alba avis
(for Claude*)
Aliéna ne cures!
Aliéna negotia non curare…
And you take care of the aliens,
Of their alien wishes and affairs,
What thunder has struck your
Hollow brow?
Your thought
Dwelling between a void and
Latin quotations, my clear alien
Friend whom I befriended in
The most alien hour of my
Late springtime …
There is a fountain in Rome
Where the young brides used to drink water
So that they could have just sons;
If you’re not my belated father, then
You are probably my new-born son,
Caught in the web of summer insects
Craving for the morning light…
When the dinner’s over
And the stories got burnt to ashes,
We leave messages to one another:
That the wax had melted down,
That the bulls got pierced by sunshine
That the wine’s red and the crystal transparent
We say so many things
But the silence remains
While at the same time encouraging us to ride on
As we had already mounted
That melancholy horse again…
A limine
(should I refuse it from the start?)
For Eric-Aesotheric Lerner
Perhaps I should say ‘no’ from the start
To this lonely year full of scaffolds
When energy flows in and out,
Like cold water oozing through a faucet;
Icy rain and snowfields, mangos for
Breakfast for our sparkling imagination,
-this is my second poem for you, my
Long-standing pal of abused poetry,
I see you in a workshop of good manners
And bad intentions, you would not shave
And hated washing your hair, and I was
Always there, absent-minded,
Trying to bring several friends back to life,
Those who appeared, but then disappeared in
The daily theatre of our vowels
And rusty consonants full of smoke.
One of them had a stroke,
And another one a jaw cancer, and the third one,
Oh, that one never died.
He ate daisies and cucumbers for lunch, and
I spoke to him in person, while I was dwelling
High, above in the sky.
You say you miss him a lot, I say: it’s fabulous
That we’ve ever met, appeared and then disappeared
On the sunny side of the street; it’s snowing a lot
Around here and all the smudges
Around my eyes remain prominent and natural by now…
There is no other Christmas gift for you
But this song and you know its special tune
So
you
can
sing
it
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
I have often asked myself what it is that constitutes the ‘essence’ of poetry. I know it’s a complex question but I must admit that each time I ask myself I invariably come back to the idea that of all the ‘arts of the word’, poetry is the most physical. Not only that, but the most directly physical aspect of poetry is connected to sound. Other aspects of poetry, like images, metaphors and suchlike are only indirectly physical in that they depend on the mental medium of the imagination rather than the physical medium connected to the actual concrete sounds of words in a poem.
Yet I also know that it is impossible to split poetry up in this way, that poetry doesn’t just consist of the relations of sounds to each other - like music - but has all sorts of other ‘components’, of which meaning, image, metaphor, metonymy and so on are just a few. Paul Valery used the analogy of the pendulum in the grandfather clock swinging from side to side to convey this idea more concisely. On the one side he placed “form: the rhythm, accent, tone, movement— in a word the Voice in action.” and on the other he placed content, “all significant values, images and ideas, stimulae of feeling and memory, virtual impulses and structures of understanding.” (I place on this side images, metaphors, metonyms, ambiguities, puns, double-entendres, amphibolies, synecdoches and so on, not to mention the surreal, snatches of the irrational and other free-floating elements which don’t necessarily have meaning, but are nonetheless part of a whole in which even the meaningless can become meaningful - at least in poetry.) The important thing for Valery, as for me, is the way one extreme of pendulum echoes the other, that is to say how sound and sense dynamically reinforce one another.
Paul Valery also said “Poetry can be recognised by this property, that it tends to get itself reproduced in its own form; it stimulates us to reconstruct it identically.” What Valery is getting at here is the fact that poetry bears repetition because it is memorable, and it is memorable because the sound and shape of its words are pleasurable and pleasurable experiences are those we seek to repeat. Of course, the sense and meaning, the way images jell - or jar - and so on and so forth are vital elements of this experience, but they are elements which would no more stand on their own than sound would stand on its own. In other words, it is both working together which makes for the pleasure, not the one divorced from the other.
So it comes down to this in the end, that poetry is both physical and mental at the same time, that it consists of the fusion of sound on the one side and sense on the other. Mallarme once said that poetry was made up of words not ideas and it is very easy to see his point, although perhaps it is a little one-sided. The pleasurable frisson poetry generates consists in the successful mating of form and content or sound and sense; it is akin, therefore, to a good mutual orgasm between two separate people in which both parties reach orgasm at the same time, making them ‘one person’ for as long as the orgasm lasts. Some people will baulk at seeing poetry in these sexual terms, in terms of “jouissance”, but I cannot think of a more appropriate metaphor - since a good orgasm is something we all like to repeat.
Valery also used the phrase “Voice in action”. Voices convey intentions and feelings. They don’t exist in isolation from the uses to which they are put. Valery’s Voice in action implies that it is the voice which bridges the two sides of the ‘poetic pendulum’, that it doesn’t just sit there limply, but is a vehicle for expressing the sense of the poem by means of the sound. He was therefore very clear about the priority of the voice in poetry. “But, in fact, who speaks in a poem? Mallarme claimed it was language itself. For me, it would be living and thinking being, driving self-awareness to the capture of sensibility - developing resonances, symmetries, etc. on the vocal chords. In sum, language coming from the voice rather than the voice from language.”
But one must also be careful not to make this side too important either. Basil Bunting, I think, was guilty of this. He once wrote, “Poetry, like music, is to be heard. It deals in sounds— long sounds and short sounds, heavy beats and light beats, the tone relation of vowels, the relations of consonants to one another, which are like instrumental colour in music. Poetry lies dead on the page until some voice brings it to life, just as music on the stave is no more than instructions to a player.” Bunting was a musical journalist, I believe, and was perhaps therefore bound to view poetry in these musical terms. But he is overstating his case, I believe. Poetry is not music. Music is all about the relations of sounds to each other and the musician must become acutely conscious of these relations in the act of composition. The sound elements in poetry are more unconscious, because the conscious focus is elsewhere. Music, by itself, does not generate meanings; poetry does. And for this reason the analogy fails. On the other hand, poetry does have a physical side which relates it to music, but the focus of a poem, its conscious focus, is not on music but meaning, and where ‘music’ enters a poem, it is on a largely unconscious basis. In fact, the best musical effects in poetry are often completely unconscious and where the musical element is consciously cultivated, it is often at the expense of the poem as a poem and, all too often, can seem quite contrived.
Getting back to Valery, he once compared poetry to dance and prose to walking from A to B. In prose, he said, the point was to get to the end of what you have read and understand it. Once you have read it and ‘got it’, you can throw it away. In other words, prose is just a means to an end which is outside it. Poetry isn’t. “Everything verbal is provisional. All language is a means. Poetry tries to make it an end.” In poetry the means and end are identical, for the point of a poem is not just what it means but also the physical pleasure it gives. OK, so it’s not a pure physical pleasure, because meaning is involved, but it is a meaning tied up with that physical pleasure, not as an end external to it. The point of dancing is the pleasure of engaging in certain physical movements for their own sake. What better way of describing a poem in which whatever meaning or meanings there are serve the end of the poem and the pleasure to be derived from it in a physical sense. Meaning or meanings assume a physical form in poetry, which they would not otherwise have, and it is the physical form which meaning acquires in a poem which is the point of the poem, not the meaning itself. This fusion in fact is of the ‘essence’ of poetry.
I’ve written enough I think to convey what I think is the ‘essence’ of poetry, that it is not simply a mental production, but a physical one as well. And those two aspects go hand in hand. Like a human being, a poem is embodied and it is very easy to forget this. (A lot of contemporary poets do.) In the past, this embodiment was often narrowly conceived in terms of certain traditional forms and techniques - the sonnet, the villanelle, rhyme, metre, et cetera. William Carlos Williams - “normally full of nothing more than the thingyness of things” as a friend of mine puts it - spoke of the “fascist sonnet”, but that’s stretching the point I believe. Valery once wrote, “Stanzas and rhymes break the tendency to go the shortest way to reach the end - that is to say prose.” (“The ball must not fall to the ground.”), which means that he obviously thought formal techniques had a definite place in poetry. Personally, I would modify that and say that in poetry there is an unconscious principle of organisation which raises it above chopped up prose, and this unconscious principle of organisation is not just mental, it is also physical. The important thing is not that a poem is written in this or that form - for I receive a lot of rhyming poetry which is execrable - but that, in whatever form it comes in, it has both physical and mental aspects which re-inforce one another and it is the fusion of both of these aspects together that finally makes it a poem.
_____________________________________________________________________
POEMS - A. C. Whitehead
Errors
Had we seen him it would have been different.
We would not have set the trap to catch what
we had heard: the loud scrattings which recurred
from time to time, as if trying to climb
the inner wall, or seeking to install
itself somewhere into a lair beneath
the floor, scratching with every tooth and claw.
So we delicately placed below a
shelf a trap with cheese upon the loose flap
and next morning found results of the spring:
what had been a beautiful doormouse, squat
and ugly in death, its neck fanned outwards,
blood around his mouth and staining the wood.
Drifting
The years drift by
like ending notes
on a windy
day. Each one floats
somewhere and I
am loath to sing,
to pray, to ask why;
they do not cling
but are empty,
fainter and fainter
and blown away
in a transfer
of all I do
and say, do not
do and say, new,
old, cold or hot.
Options
He spent his life in the unbent
certainty of unknowing.
never molesting a request,
never having sought endeavour
nor kicked, nor thumped, nor considered
how what all thought inevitable
permits the unsuspected.
Secretly he enjoyed the debt,
the chill dependability
of uncertainty. Thus flirting,
it became the acclaimed country
of his adoption, the top hills
and clouds expanding to shield him
from sun, the forest promising
protection from revelations
of light and what shadows disclose,
its rivers affirmatively
smashing with panache down gorges
with the invincible message
of a committed gravity.
Predators
Spectacles? We have checked and lived on them
before the eleventh of September
to the rehearsed Olympic open burst,
or wherever we can grovel to gnaw
when reputations putrify and rot
in court or on the streets where we distort
a carcass of the dead and yark them all
around the globe, confound the innocent
or guilty -- never torn between the two
but tearing at them both and slurring truth,
feeding on what was life and heeding none
or claiming public appetite as game --
and so it is, or we would have no wing
to lower in the swoop, nor beak to show
the whitened bones of victims we have owned.
__________________________________________________
SHARD - John Bennett
Prerequisites
She dreamed she was Cleopatra. She got herself a rowboat and rowed around the shore of her daddy's private lake. She stayed out of deep water but was still in over her head. Already. At age six. She ate chocolate non-stop and kept hoping Anthony would leave Rome and save her. She grew fat and graduated from grade school. In high school she took a drink and woke up in a bad part of town. She repeated the process enhanced by cocaine right into her senior year. By that time the boys had grown bored with her and even daddy stopped tucking her in at night. She graduated. She turned street legal and cashed in her inheritance. Took speed, trimmed down, flew to Egypt. Rented a cruise ship and sailed the Nile draped in gold and silver, emeralds and turquoise. And then the money ran out. She rode Greyhound from city to city, became a truck-stop mama, milked A.A. and N.A. for all they were worth. Six treatment centers, nine county jails, three shrinks and a handful of counselors later, she hit bottom. She went back to school. Got her own shrink credentials. Settled down in a plush L.A. office and tapped the eraser-end of a #2 pencil on her desktop, waiting for the first paying customer to step thru the door.
_____________________________________________________________________
POEMS - George Held
A Rejoynder
Nora Barnacle once complained about her husband James Joyce’s late hours, “I can’t sleep anymore … I go to bed and then that man sits in the next room and continues laughing about his own writing. And then I knock at the door, and I say, now Jim, stop writing or stop laughing.”
The wife’s given an ultimatum:
“Quit writing or quit laughing.”
Might as well say, “Quit living”
Writing’s Jim’s desideratum.
Wm. Blake
27 Broad St.
London, England
A Poison Tree
I was angry with my friend:
I told my wrath, my wrath did end.
I was angry with my foe:
I told it not, my wrath did grow.
And I watered it in fears
Night and morning with my tears,
And I sunned it with smiles
And with soft deceitful wiles.
And it grew both day and night,
Till it bore an apple bright,
And my foe beheld it shine,
And he knew that it was mine, --
And into my garden stole
When the night had veiled the pole;
In the morning, glad, I see
My foe outstretched beneath the tree.
Dear Mr. Blake:
Thank you for your submission. Unfortunately, we do not publish rhyming verse. However, we like the suggestion of a narrative in "Poison Tree" and want to encourage you to consider revision and possible resubmission. Try rewriting in the third person and give the main character and his foe names, like Vinnie and Judas, and lose the rhymes. For instance, you could replace "pole" with "sky" and add the benefit of removing a word that might lift our censors' eyebrows.
Think it over. We pride ourselves on our willingness to work with our contributors.
Best wishes with your (free verse) writing.
Prue Callow, Poetry Editor, The Ashbery Review
___________________________________________________________________________________________
POEMS - Nina Zivancevic
Alba avis
(for Claude*)
Aliéna ne cures!
Aliéna negotia non curare…
And you take care of the aliens,
Of their alien wishes and affairs,
What thunder has struck your
Hollow brow?
Your thought
Dwelling between a void and
Latin quotations, my clear alien
Friend whom I befriended in
The most alien hour of my
Late springtime …
There is a fountain in Rome
Where the young brides used to drink water
So that they could have just sons;
If you’re not my belated father, then
You are probably my new-born son,
Caught in the web of summer insects
Craving for the morning light…
When the dinner’s over
And the stories got burnt to ashes,
We leave messages to one another:
That the wax had melted down,
That the bulls got pierced by sunshine
That the wine’s red and the crystal transparent
We say so many things
But the silence remains
While at the same time encouraging us to ride on
As we had already mounted
That melancholy horse again…
A limine
(should I refuse it from the start?)
For Eric-Aesotheric Lerner
Perhaps I should say ‘no’ from the start
To this lonely year full of scaffolds
When energy flows in and out,
Like cold water oozing through a faucet;
Icy rain and snowfields, mangos for
Breakfast for our sparkling imagination,
-this is my second poem for you, my
Long-standing pal of abused poetry,
I see you in a workshop of good manners
And bad intentions, you would not shave
And hated washing your hair, and I was
Always there, absent-minded,
Trying to bring several friends back to life,
Those who appeared, but then disappeared in
The daily theatre of our vowels
And rusty consonants full of smoke.
One of them had a stroke,
And another one a jaw cancer, and the third one,
Oh, that one never died.
He ate daisies and cucumbers for lunch, and
I spoke to him in person, while I was dwelling
High, above in the sky.
You say you miss him a lot, I say: it’s fabulous
That we’ve ever met, appeared and then disappeared
On the sunny side of the street; it’s snowing a lot
Around here and all the smudges
Around my eyes remain prominent and natural by now…
There is no other Christmas gift for you
But this song and you know its special tune
So
you
can
sing
it
_________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________
REVIEW
BERNARD KOPS DANCING IN THE SUNLIGHT
=================================
This Room in the Sunlight
Collected Poems by Bernard Kops
David Paul Publishing, London, 2010, £9.99p.,
Paperback, 132pp., ISBN 9780954848262
=================================
BERNARD KOPS DANCING IN THE SUNLIGHT
=================================
This Room in the Sunlight
Collected Poems by Bernard Kops
David Paul Publishing, London, 2010, £9.99p.,
Paperback, 132pp., ISBN 9780954848262
=================================
AMONG the greatest events of British literature this decade is the publication of the collected poems of Bernard Kops, the doyen of contemporary European verse. His career began close to seven decades ago when he became the bard singing of the ruthless exploitation and callous neglect endured by the now bygone Jewish immigrant communities of London’s East End -- their old men huddled around the wireless (his words) weeping tears of pride at weather forecasts from Radio Moscow. He has gone far beyond that.
Queen Elizabeth last year rewarded him, at the advice of Gordon Brown, then her prime minister, with a Civil List Pension in recognition of his service to literature. This is a very rare honour that he now shares with Lord Byron and William Wordsworth. Probably the only member of the British poetry-reading public still doggedly unaware that Kops has taken his rightful place among these literary giants is Kops himself.
Kops (b. 1926) is a top British dramatist, his plays performed worldwide for decades. He has written more than 40 plays, nine novels and two autobiographies. He runs a master-class for playwrights. But poetry remains for him, as he put it, the quintessence of everything in literature.
His plays have won many prizes and they have been performed in many translations. One of his recent classics, The Dreams of Anne Frank (1992), has been performed in Hungary, and it is now being translated into Czech to confront the rise of anti-Semitism sweeping Eastern Europe. The play is about the miracle of survival through the Holocaust that claimed Kops’ large extended family in Amsterdam. Anne Frank’s Fragments from Nowhere, a hugely powerful poem in the new collection, is a prayer for peace.
He is extraordinarily prolific. A sense of humour almost never deserts him. Here is how he says he experiences creativity:
Poems are like grandchildren.
You should never bribe or persuade them
to visit you.
...But wait until they enter and overwhelm
and delight you.
Kops is my teacher and my close friend. He is a spellbinding public speaker whose still frequent performances are often remembered in small detail by his audiences for years after such events. He is easily approachable, with informal manners radiating the warmth of a secure early childhood when he was spoilt by the love of his six elder sisters. But his face betrays the suffering endured by him as well as his extended family.
This is Kops’ eighth collection of verse. The poems are mostly deceptively simple, insightful, dark-and-joyful and poignant. Many are already classics, having assumed lives of their own. The book includes more than 40 hitherto unpublished pieces among the old favourites describing the desperation of destitute communities dependent for survival on soup kitchens and pawnbrokers.
They also deal with Kops’ own, quarter-century struggle with drug addition and an attempted suicide. Familiar literary figures crop up in the work, friends and idols like the First World War poet Isaac Rosenberg, another Jewish master from the East End of London, as well as W. H. Auden, Allen Ginsberg and the recently deceased Adrian Mitchell. The collection addresses death much too much for my comfort.
Kops‘ poetry combining touching simplicity with naked passion stems from an 18th century English literary tradition revived in the 20th century by Rosenberg. The poems project great empathy and deep emotional commitment, their power driven by a desperate, unconcealed awareness of the vulnerability of all living things.
The new collection contains something very Jewish but also very rare in Western literature -- a deeply felt recurring declaration of passionate, lifelong matrimonial love. The poet’s muse, wife, lover, friend, editor, mentor and manager and the mother of his four children is Erica, a diminutive woman of enormous intensity, the sort of matriarch you might think Rachel of the Bible might have become if she had been granted a longer life. The collection is dedicated to her.
This is how Kops describes her in a train ride:
Beside me is a lovely girl
with long dark hair.
The sun strikes the amber of her dreaming eyes
where I am trapped like a prehistoric fly.
She smiles.
I must get to know her.
She is my wife.
East London as Kops knew it no longer exists. The dockside Jewish communities once sheltering there from the Holocaust have moved on to the prosperous North-West London suburbs of Golders Green and Hampstead. Their place has been taken by more recent immigrant communities from South Asia, introducing to it their very differently exuberant culture. But East London has not forgotten Kops.
The collection opens with the poem Whitechapel Library, Aldgate East paying homage to that institution, once known as the university of the poor, that the poet used to attend as an ill-clad, hungry child feasting on literature. Today, lines of that poem grace the walls of the library, which now serves a splendid modern museum.
On a recent visit to the museum for a performance of a Kops play -- Whitechapel Dreams (2008), about an Asian teenager seeking refuge from her family at the library -- I watched young girls and stern matrons gaze at Kops fondly when they thought he did not notice. A bartender brought me free drinks when he become aware that I was in the poet’s company.
Kops is a well known figure of the community. He stages plays there and holds poetry readings, lectures and theatrical workshops. The local press reports on his views and activities. Many residents warmly recognize him on streets and in restaurants.
Kops left school at 13 during the Blitz. He tried acting and the second-hand book trade, drifted through the bohemian world of Soho and won sudden, unexpected fame with his East End play The Hamlet of Stepney Green (1957).
That was drama steeped in the Yiddish theatrical tradition. It pioneered Britain’s “New Wave” of “kitchen-sink” drama that was to sweep away a lot of entrenched theatrical conventions. He was hailed for it by the critics of the day as a significant trendsetter. But several of his subsequent plays were slaughtered by the press. A theatre performing his play Ezra (1981) about the anti-Semite American poet Ezra Pound was firebombed. Most of his life he was dodged by financial worries.
This Room in the Sunlight -- the final poem in the collection -- sings the joy of the simple, greatest pleasures of love, creativity and sharing. Kops’ ability to issue such a book after the bleak decades of drug-induced breakdowns praises the steadfast, unflinching support of a strong and devoted wife.
From THOMAS LAND
THOMAS ORSZÁG-LAND is a poet and award-winning foreign correspondent. His last major work was Christmas in Auschwitz: Holocaust Poetry Translated from the Hungarian of András Mezei (Smokestcack, England, 2010).
Queen Elizabeth last year rewarded him, at the advice of Gordon Brown, then her prime minister, with a Civil List Pension in recognition of his service to literature. This is a very rare honour that he now shares with Lord Byron and William Wordsworth. Probably the only member of the British poetry-reading public still doggedly unaware that Kops has taken his rightful place among these literary giants is Kops himself.
Kops (b. 1926) is a top British dramatist, his plays performed worldwide for decades. He has written more than 40 plays, nine novels and two autobiographies. He runs a master-class for playwrights. But poetry remains for him, as he put it, the quintessence of everything in literature.
His plays have won many prizes and they have been performed in many translations. One of his recent classics, The Dreams of Anne Frank (1992), has been performed in Hungary, and it is now being translated into Czech to confront the rise of anti-Semitism sweeping Eastern Europe. The play is about the miracle of survival through the Holocaust that claimed Kops’ large extended family in Amsterdam. Anne Frank’s Fragments from Nowhere, a hugely powerful poem in the new collection, is a prayer for peace.
He is extraordinarily prolific. A sense of humour almost never deserts him. Here is how he says he experiences creativity:
Poems are like grandchildren.
You should never bribe or persuade them
to visit you.
...But wait until they enter and overwhelm
and delight you.
Kops is my teacher and my close friend. He is a spellbinding public speaker whose still frequent performances are often remembered in small detail by his audiences for years after such events. He is easily approachable, with informal manners radiating the warmth of a secure early childhood when he was spoilt by the love of his six elder sisters. But his face betrays the suffering endured by him as well as his extended family.
This is Kops’ eighth collection of verse. The poems are mostly deceptively simple, insightful, dark-and-joyful and poignant. Many are already classics, having assumed lives of their own. The book includes more than 40 hitherto unpublished pieces among the old favourites describing the desperation of destitute communities dependent for survival on soup kitchens and pawnbrokers.
They also deal with Kops’ own, quarter-century struggle with drug addition and an attempted suicide. Familiar literary figures crop up in the work, friends and idols like the First World War poet Isaac Rosenberg, another Jewish master from the East End of London, as well as W. H. Auden, Allen Ginsberg and the recently deceased Adrian Mitchell. The collection addresses death much too much for my comfort.
Kops‘ poetry combining touching simplicity with naked passion stems from an 18th century English literary tradition revived in the 20th century by Rosenberg. The poems project great empathy and deep emotional commitment, their power driven by a desperate, unconcealed awareness of the vulnerability of all living things.
The new collection contains something very Jewish but also very rare in Western literature -- a deeply felt recurring declaration of passionate, lifelong matrimonial love. The poet’s muse, wife, lover, friend, editor, mentor and manager and the mother of his four children is Erica, a diminutive woman of enormous intensity, the sort of matriarch you might think Rachel of the Bible might have become if she had been granted a longer life. The collection is dedicated to her.
This is how Kops describes her in a train ride:
Beside me is a lovely girl
with long dark hair.
The sun strikes the amber of her dreaming eyes
where I am trapped like a prehistoric fly.
She smiles.
I must get to know her.
She is my wife.
East London as Kops knew it no longer exists. The dockside Jewish communities once sheltering there from the Holocaust have moved on to the prosperous North-West London suburbs of Golders Green and Hampstead. Their place has been taken by more recent immigrant communities from South Asia, introducing to it their very differently exuberant culture. But East London has not forgotten Kops.
The collection opens with the poem Whitechapel Library, Aldgate East paying homage to that institution, once known as the university of the poor, that the poet used to attend as an ill-clad, hungry child feasting on literature. Today, lines of that poem grace the walls of the library, which now serves a splendid modern museum.
On a recent visit to the museum for a performance of a Kops play -- Whitechapel Dreams (2008), about an Asian teenager seeking refuge from her family at the library -- I watched young girls and stern matrons gaze at Kops fondly when they thought he did not notice. A bartender brought me free drinks when he become aware that I was in the poet’s company.
Kops is a well known figure of the community. He stages plays there and holds poetry readings, lectures and theatrical workshops. The local press reports on his views and activities. Many residents warmly recognize him on streets and in restaurants.
Kops left school at 13 during the Blitz. He tried acting and the second-hand book trade, drifted through the bohemian world of Soho and won sudden, unexpected fame with his East End play The Hamlet of Stepney Green (1957).
That was drama steeped in the Yiddish theatrical tradition. It pioneered Britain’s “New Wave” of “kitchen-sink” drama that was to sweep away a lot of entrenched theatrical conventions. He was hailed for it by the critics of the day as a significant trendsetter. But several of his subsequent plays were slaughtered by the press. A theatre performing his play Ezra (1981) about the anti-Semite American poet Ezra Pound was firebombed. Most of his life he was dodged by financial worries.
This Room in the Sunlight -- the final poem in the collection -- sings the joy of the simple, greatest pleasures of love, creativity and sharing. Kops’ ability to issue such a book after the bleak decades of drug-induced breakdowns praises the steadfast, unflinching support of a strong and devoted wife.
From THOMAS LAND
THOMAS ORSZÁG-LAND is a poet and award-winning foreign correspondent. His last major work was Christmas in Auschwitz: Holocaust Poetry Translated from the Hungarian of András Mezei (Smokestcack, England, 2010).
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