Poetry
Poetry # 1 Paul Durcan
I am starting a new project. To work towards a collection of poems worthy of publication. I have always written poetry, intermittently, over the years. When I was ten years old I wrote The Man With Ten Fingers And Just One Hand. I remember the exhilaration of writing it, the electricity. It was the work of a ten year old child but the charge I felt remains the same sought after feeling today. I had picked up Paul Durcan’s Jesus and Angela, intrigued by the cover, a series of stills from a roll of film showing the poet in various stances – thinking man to fist shaking passion. I settled upon a poem – The Woman Who Keeps Her Breasts In The Back Garden. It starts with an anonymous interviewer asking the question Why do you keep your breasts in the back garden? The woman responds Well it’s a male dominated society, isn’t it? .She then goes on to explain that she wants to avoid the ‘ballyhoo about breasts’ and controls how much ‘bosom gaping’ males get to do. She reveals she has other things on her mind such as Australia. To tell you the truth I think a great deal about Australia.
I didn’t know what to make of this, I was happily baffled. It was working away in the background and its meaning was discovered in my translation. The next day there was a story in the news about nuns that had died in a plane crash. Upon hearing this I immediately wrote the poem. The text included something along the lines of: the man with ten fingers and just one hand, can write and eat but cannot pray/ God has moved in a mysterious way. Durcan’s magic pedestrianism offered a tool to make sense of the world. It enabled my attempt to ‘hold justice and reality in the one thought'. All the time being ignorant of Yeat’s lofty equation for the poetic aim. I was ten and my family had just moved from a housing estate in North Dublin to Inishere of the Aran Islands. I spoke English, the second language on the two square miles of limestone rock, there were no forests or shopping centres or traffic lights even, it felt like a world away from where I’d come.
Now I’m going to try and engage with poetry for a sustained period of time. (while I can!) I frequently experience a distinct lack of alacrity, a dull slowness and creeping vagueness, this is a consequence of Parkinson’s. This can inhibit creativity but there moments where I can forget Parkinson's.
Poetry is a form of expression that might be more manageable than the
drama of theatre production. I’m not going to stop being a playwright but I hope to box clever and write some poems.
I look forward to working with poet/teacher/dramaturg Jessica Traynor in her role as mentor And I am grateful to Arts Disability Ireland and the Arts Council Ireland to support this relationship. Also I would like to thank Irish Theatre Institute in facilitating my application.
Poetry #2
Paul Celan
Assisi
Again, the surprise of something that seems to bypass my conscious understanding yet lives happily ever after somewhere in the brain. This is twelve or thirteen years later and I’m in Charlie Byrne’s Bookshop in Galway, always a great place to browse. I pick up a book Collected Poems By Paul Celan translated by Michael Hamburger. I’d never heard of either poets before. I flicked through and stopped at the poem Assisi, included below. I read it once and I was stunned. I couldn’t account for it. I tried some of his other poems but they didn’t even start to have the same effect.
Writing about this event automatically invites an analytical voice to justify the significance of the poem. It would naturally follow that I should trace the influences and identify the allusions beneath the text. Of course there is the horror of the Holocaust haunting his biography. But the joy of reading this poem survives intact without realising such consideration. At the same time I don’t want to just plonk it here.
What happened?
Firstly, props must be given to Michael Hamburger’s translation. I doubt you can improve something through translation, instead it’s far easier to desecrate the original. Especially if that something is as delicate and nuanced as Celan’s poem. I think Heaney said poetry happens before words happen or something to that effect. And I feel, albeit acknowledging my inability to verify, that Hamburger honours that early impulse of the poem.
The simple repetition is effective in creating a solemn mood and drives the poem down and in. The attached information is worked through to arrive at a new epigram which gives the impetus for the next round. Together they operate like the declension of some verb. Which in turn facilitates the impression of a grammar as opposed to a narrative. Its like the verb for the earth in the location of Assisi. This may or may not explain the profound impression this poem made. Altogether, I feel that a rare generous sensibility came through and still does to this day.
Assisi
Umbrian night.
Umbrian night with the silver of churchbell and olive leaf.
Umbrian night with the stone that you carried here.
Umbrian night with the stone.
Dumb, that which rose into life, dumb.
Refills the jugs, come.Earthenware jug.
Earthenware jug to which the potter’s hand grew affixed.
Earthenware jug which a shade’s hand closed for ever.
Earthenware jug with a shade’s seal.Stone, wherever you look, stone.
Let the grey animal in.
Trotting animal.
Trotting animal in the snow the nakedest hand scatters.
Trotting animal before the word that clicked shut.
Trotting animal that takes sleep from the feeding hand.
Brightness that will not comfort, brightness you shed.
Still they are begging, Francis – the dead.
Paul Celan reads his poem Assisi (1955).
Michael Hamburger translates:
Poetry # 5
In writing this blog I’ve learned at least one thing: writing is better than not writing. It’s taken too long to be able to make that blindingly simple observation. I’ve spent most of the years and the few lives on offer, not writing. I suppose I had to learn how to suspend my own critic.
I’ve learnt another thing. Seamus Heaney and WB Yeats seem to be working away in the background. I see them as guides in helping to understand an art that I care about. Others might see them as perpetuators of patriarchy or worse. Sometimes the cyber security software slows things to a standstill. Why I remember their words is not because of their biogs.
My primary aim is not in critiquing poems, instead celebrate the fact that writing opens the potential for celebrating what is.
Existence is a function of relationship – Alan Watts
I’m interested in the way poems can come from somewhere bigger than the self.
I had wanted to write about ‘cut-through’. (Stares at the screen for minutes, mouth open) Just that sometimes I suspect that I don’t ‘get’ things, I otherwise would. But there’s no doubt about the impact of Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women. I ‘get’ things but the difficulty lies in the clear communication of such reception. But Anne Boyer’s Garments Against Women makes an impression. Not a palpable impact. Rather a wholesale reorientation of the world.
A world is in fact the projection of meaningful patterns onto the surrounding space of lived experience, and the sharing of a common code whose key lies in the forms of life of the community itself - Franco ‘Bifo’ Berardi
Demystify inspiration. Is it Metoo time for the muse?
Garments Against Women made me want to watch less television.And I did.
My attention is compromised
Yeah but isn’t everyone’s?
Maybe but my attention isn’t what it used to be.
I know, I’m the same…
Fuck off and get Parkinson’s, then we can struggle to talk.
But I do have Parkinson’s
Do you?
Yeah, of course I do.
A law that exceeds the bounds of law
What is that law but poetry
Anne Boyer
For better, further reading:
https://nplusonemag.com/online-only/online-only/poetry-after-poetry/
Poetry #6
A Book of Luminous Things. An international anthology of poetry edited by Czeslaw Milosz
I should just award this anthology 5 stars and move on, especially since my hands are intent on non-compliance. But that great 'deadener' – habit, is stronger than disease, and my capacity for saying nothing of any consequence to no one, remains undiminished. I think back to the lucky audiences who’ve endured my presence and voicings for 50 or 60 minutes, and I’m proud to realise that they were ahead of their time. They intuitively practiced extreme social distancing. It’s easy to laugh, though not literally- my first speech therapy session is today.
I’ve been a fan of Czeslaw Milosz’ poetry for a while. Ted Hughes pointed me in his direction via Al Alvarez’s Faber Book of Modern European Poetry. With minimal knowledge of Milosz’ work and his compatriots Wislawa Szymborska and Zbigniew Herbert, I was inspired to lurch towards a TEFL job in Poland. It turned out to be my first rehearsal in performing to a reluctant audience. I was the only person in a town of 70,000, that didn’t speak Polish, apart from a Canadian pastor who was evangelising through, and two Americans I witnessed one night at a karaoke. But I wasn't that desperate to break cover.
There were many tower blocks there and they were named after poets, I lived in Ul Konipickiej (she came second in the competition to write the Polish national anthem). I was holed up in a top floor flat reading The Captive Mind, mystified to what I was actually doing with my life. I soon found out that the students I tried to teach, were oblivious to the products of the poetic propaganda. What was I expecting? I honestly don’t know.
However, I was more confident that A Book of Luminous Things would deliver on its promise. And I was not disappointed. In the introduction he identifies science and technology as having caused a 'deprivation' that 'pollutes the natural world' as well as the 'imagination'.
The world deprived of clear-cut outlines, of the up and down, of good and evil, succumbs to a peculiar nihilization, that is, it loses its colours, so that grayness covers not only things of this earth and of space, but also the very flow of time...Since poetry deals with the singular, not the general, it cannot- if it is good poetry, look at things of this earth other than as colorful, variegated and exciting...poetry is therefore on the side of being and against nothingness.
In The Middle Of The Road – Carlos Drummond de Andrade
In the middle of the road there was a stone
there was a stone in the middle of the road
there was a stone
in the middle of the road there was a stone.
Never should I forget this event
in the life of my fatigued retinas.
Never should I forget that in the middle of the road
there was a stone
there was a stone in the middle of the road
in the middle of the road there was a stone.
Translated- Elizabeth Bishop
Epiphany is an unveiling of reality...This poem is like a joke and we are inclined, first, to smile, yet a moment of thought suffices to restore a serious meaning to such an encounter. It is enough to live truly intensely our meeting with a thing to preserve it forever in our memory.
I always got the sense that Milosz knew more than other poets. That wisdom is revealed in the brief notes on selected poems. He values conciseness and simplicity. Through these qualities the poems achieve a certain register, a luminosity. And they, like the editor, persuade through their lack of strenuous persuasion. Which brings me back to speech therapy. My 'outside voice' is fading so I have to practice loudness. This makes me appreciate when someone else can see beyond the surface.
Going Blind – Rainer Maria Rilke
She sat just like the others at the table.
But on second glance, she seemed to hold her cup
a little differently as she picked it up.
She smiled once. It was almost painful.
And when they finished and it was time to stand
and slowly, as chance selected them, they left
and moved through many rooms (they talked and laughed),
I saw her. She was moving far behind
the others, absorbed, like someone who will soon
have to sing before a large assembly;
upon her eyes, which were radiant with joy,
light played as on the surface of a pool.
She followed slowly, taking a long time,
as though there were some obstacle in the way;
and yet: as though, once it was overcome,
she would be beyond all walking, and would fly.
