Marama:omoopart5

Whitman Larkin

2012-02-13T09:45:00.003-05:00

Goodbye, my Fancy!
Farewell, dear mate, dear love!
I'm going away, I know not where,
Or to what fortune or whether I may ever see you again.
So Good-bye my Fancy.

Rather than words comes the thought of high windows
The sun-comprehending glass.
And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows
Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless.

Byron

2012-02-11T13:19:00.002-05:00

"The appeal of the Byronic hero is not hard to understand. He is, in Herbert Read's delightful phrase, the "super-realist personality" who by the absolute courage of his defiance of moral and social taboos becomes "the unconfessed hero of humanity." He exists in one form or another in the dream life of all of us, whether we like it or not, as the embodiment of those impulses cramped or inhibited by society. He is the expression of our social insecurity, our distrust of our fellows, our dissatisfaction with authority, our disillusionment with social achievement. He is the symbol of our defiant refusal to accept the insignificant role of the individual ego in society or the universe which modern knowledge forces upon us. In short, he represents the ego in conflict with the forces battering to subdue or destroy it - the ego which triumphs even in its moment of defeat." (Edward E. Bostetter, Introduction to Byron's "Selected Poetry And Letters" - Rinehart Editions)

Yet, inevitably:

So, we'll go no more a roving
So late into the night,
Though the heart be still as loving
And the moon be still as Bright.

For the sword outwears its sheath,
And the soul outwears the breast,
And the heart must pause to breathe,
And love itself have rest.

Though the night was made for loving,
And the day returns too soon,
Yet we'll go no more a roving
By the light of the moon.

with thanks to my friend Keith Woolnough

2012-02-04T00:26:00.008-05:00

Here's an excerpt from Longfellow in response to "F. Scott" Romney, who would be POTUS, and who believes the "very poor" are different from him, and, like Oliver Twist, mustn't ask for more.

Titled "Challenge" the poem closes Jack London's book THE PEOPLE OF THE ABYSS.

There is a greater army
That besets us round with strife,
A starving, numberless army
At all the gates of life.

The poverty-stricken millions
Who challenge our wine and bread,
And impeach us all as traitors,
Both the living an the dead.

And whenever I sit at the banquet,
Where the feast and song are high,
Amid the mirth and music
I can hear that fearful cry.

And hollow and haggard faces
Look into the lighted hall,
And wasted hands are extended
To catch the crumbs that fall.

And within there is light and plenty,
And odors fill the air;
But without there is cold and darkness,
And hunger and despair.

And there in the camp of famine,
In wind, and cold, and rain,
Christ, the great Lord of the Army,
Lies dead upon the plain.

Sweet Lorine

2012-01-14T14:28:00.020-05:00

"I was Blondie" she wrote....

"I worked the print shop

right down among em

the folk from whom all poetry flows

and dreadfully much else"

I can understand why Mark Scroggins, in his biography of Zukofsky, fought shy of Lorine Niedecker's role in Z's life and his poetry; however, as Margot Peters notes in LORINE NIEDECKER A POET'S LIFE (U. of Wisconsin Press, 2011) :

"Scroggins's exclusion of LN from a life of LZ seems inexplicable unless one knows that LZ's son, Paul Zukofsky controls his literary estate and hence any biography. PZ is, by all accounts, an obsessively private person determined to eradicate anything that might discredit his father."

There is much to discredit Louis Zukofsky personally: his wieldling his power over Lorine Niedecker to the extent that, in addition to bullying her into an abortion of what would have been, as it turned out, twins, although she wanted the child and had said she would never bother him for requests for money and would live as a single-parent mother back in Wisconsin, he is responsible for having her, against her will, destroy all parts of her letters to him (and his to her) except those parts dealing specifically with attention and praise for his, Zukofsky's, poetry. And all of their early intimate correspondence. Of course Margot Peters's biography, though clearly written and most readable, and well-researched, does read sometimes (in its relating hearsay "evidence" in lieu of a microphone in Zukofsky's bedroom in his apartment in Manhattan where Lorine visited and stayed several times) like a Janet Evanovitch novel. Now I like her protagonist, Stephanie Plum, as well or more as the next guy. I'm not overly keen on it all in a biography. We learn, for example, that Pound and Zukofsky had sexual relations, Z considering P a "sexual predator"; that Jerry Reisman was Zukofsky's sexual partner before Lorine arrived on the scene. Not a lot of authentication for this, but maybe it's common knowledge, I wouldn't know.

Mark Scroggins skips too lightly over the "family romance" of the Orthodox Jewish Zukofsky family into which Louis was born, except to say that when he was bullied as a young boy on the streets, he would recite his way out of it by doing the Yiddish version of "Hiawatha" by Solomon Bloomgarden. It doesn't take a brain surgeon to realize that he was never going to allow, if he could help it, a child of his to be born to a shiksa. And he was not averse to having her type out all of his manuscripts, including the first parts of "A" his "poem of a life" in 23 plus one often arcane installments which go on and on too often like a broken record (except for A 16). He uses language to keep his subconscious repressed or at least at bay while constructing what he perceives as moving closer to music in the exactitude and precision of words. As Basil Bunting commented, sometimes it worked, although too often it was failed experiment (BBC Cassettes, conversation with Eric Mottram). In my opinion, Zukofsky is the most highly-overrated of 20th century innovative poets. This is despite the exceptionally high opinion which both Cid Corman and my dear friend Asa Benveniste had of his work, and was celebrated between them in unpublished correspondence. And the highly successful cognitive explication of 80 FLOWERS, by my old friend Leon Lewis (published in "The Writer's Chronicle" volume 40, number 4). All agreed Zukofsky was beyond difficult as a man. The friendship with George Oppen went to breaking-point when Oppen admitted he preferred his own poems to Z's. And Bunting was taken aback meeting Zukofsky again in New York, after a Bunting reading Z did not attend, and spending "a painful hour" later with him, describing Z as "very bitter and, strangely, very jealous." The Artist is a Monster Cocteau wrote, and though no monster, Z was certainly a bit of a schmuck.

Niedecker survived her broken heart syndrome, worked her sad way through the "For Paul" poems, and went on to become the greater poet of the two. Wintergreen Ridge is one of the most outstanding eco-poems ever written, praising "Women / of good wild stock" who

Stood stolid

Before machines

They stopped bulldozers

cold

We want it for all time

they said

Peters' bio does give you a fair sense of the hard rural poverty Niedecker lived in and through most all of her life. Having made a pilgrimage some years ago with my oldest friend, Leonard V. Kaplan, then a professor at Wisconsin College of Law in Madison, I can attest to the almost dire nature of where/how she lived, having not even indoor plumbing for many years. Her late-life marriage brought her a bit of comfort of sorts, and Cid Corman made the only tape of her reading her poems, just a few months before she died in 1970. Her nickname was "Squeaky" in high school, and the remnants of that voice are present enough on the tape so that her detractors have commented on her "girlish" rather than "mature" voice. "Every woman adores a Fascist" Sylvia Plath had written, and despite decades of failing eyesight (she used a magnifying glass over her spectacles to read), she faithfully, one might say slavishly, typed Z's manuscripts, which he sent to her from New York. Zukofsky's work is polar opposite of Bukowski's (original spelling of his name: Bukofsky), and it is the avant garde end of Academia (an oxymoron) who now read Z's poetry. When Zukofsky and his wife, Celia, and son, formed "a closed Trinity" as Carl Rakosi said, Lorine was ex-communicated. Z's major work, "A", is, as Eric Mottram writes in the issue of John Taggart's MAPS devoted to Z's work, "Autobiography, organic poem, and history contrasted to perfection in art. But this is a pattern of alibis for constructing an organic vision which takes place within the stasis of perfection."

Rita Dove omits both Niedecker and Zukofsky, along with Oppen, and of course so many others (Dorn!) in her Penguin American poetry anthology, in the pursuit of what? Crow Jim? Not excellence, certainly, or why publish Amiri Baraka's weakest poems, which include his anti-Jewish prejudice, rather than his best work. I reckon Dove either is ignorant of innovative poetry, willfully or not, or just has her own axe to grind against it. Her anthology continues the tradition of the monied establishment dumbing-down American life and Letters by setting up a Canon which keeps many of the omitted major poets out of mass distribution, just as Eliot, at Faber & Faber, kept Williams out (the first edition of WCW being published in the UK not until 1964, when Williams was already one year dead) and away from publishers' radar, and kept most if not all heterosexual poets at arm's length from Faber during his tenure there. Niedecker is one of our great twentieth century poets. Even though she spent years of her life scrubbing hospital floors in Fort Atkinson, Wisconsin, she never lost her dedication, and her idealistic belief in poetry as a Way. Some of her short poems, like "I rose from marsh mud"; "There's a better shine"; "I married"; and a few others, are among the best we have.

Bill Sherman in Commemoration of the International "Human Rights Day"

2011-12-11T20:39:00.003-05:00

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williamdavidsherman has shared a video with you on YouTube: Poet Bill Sherman in Commemoration of the International Human Rights Day
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Christopher Logue, R.I.P.

2011-12-03T22:07:00.007-05:00

It wasn't until late 1962, when I was a young (21 year old) Teaching Fellow in the English Department of the State U. of N.Y. at Buffalo, doing an M.A., that I began to fully feel and understand the extremes of terrible beauty and transformative power of poetry, beyond any I had previously experienced. It was when I encountered the new English version/translation of Book 16 of THE ILIAD by Christopher Logue, first published in issue number 28 of THE PARIS REVIEW.

Here is the final section.

Coming behind you in the dusk you felt
-What was it? - felt the darkness part and then
APOLLO!
Who had been patient with you,
Struck.

His hand came out of the east,
And in his wrist lay eternity.
And every atom of his mythic weight
Was poised between his fist and bent left leg.
And it hit the small of your back, Patroclus...
Your eyes leant out. Achilles' helmet rang
Far and away beneath the cannon-bones of enemy horses,
And Achilles' breastplate (five copper plys
Mastered with even bronze) split like a pod.
And you were footless... staggering... amazed
Between the clumps of dying, dying yourself,
Dazed by the brilliance in your eyes
And the noise, like weirs heard far away.
So you staggered, blind eyes open,
Dabbling your astounded fingers in the vomit
On your chest.
And all the Trojans lay and stared at you,
Propped themselves up and stared at you,
Feeling themselves as blest as you felt cursed.
All of them just lay and stared
Except a boy called Euphorbus.
He took his chance and threw. Straight.
The javelin went through both calves,
Stitching your knees together, and you fell
(Not noticing your pain) and tried to crawl,
Towards the fleet, and - even now - snatching
Euphorbus' ankle, Ah! and got it? No...
Not a boy's ankle that you got.
But Hector's

Standing above you,
His bronze mask smiling down into your face,
Putting his spear through...ach, and saying,
"Why tears, Patroclus?
Did you hope to melt Troy down
And make our women carry home the ingots for you?
I can just imagine it!
You and your marvellous Achilles sitting,
Him with his upright finger wagging, saying,
"Don't show your face in here again, Patroclus,
Unless it's red with Hector's blood."
You fool.
You weak, impudent, silly little fool."
And Patroclus,
Shaking his voice out of his body, says
"Big Mouth,
Remember it took three of you to kill me,
A god, a boy, and last of all a hero!
I can hear Death
Calling my name and yet,
Somehow it sounds like "Hector"
And when I close my eyes
I see Achilles' face with Death's voice coming out of it."

Saying these things Patroclus died.
And as his soul went through the sand like water,
Hector drew out his spear and said,
"Perhaps."

Army tests hypersonic weapon over the Pacific - Are We Feeling Safer Now?

2011-11-18T17:35:00.001-05:00

--- On Fri, 11/18/11, mailbot@news.yahoo.com <mailbot@news.yahoo.com> wrote:

From: mailbot@news.yahoo.com <mailbot@news.yahoo.com>
Subject: Army tests hypersonic weapon over the Pacific - Yahoo! News
To: branchredd@yahoo.com
Date: Friday, November 18, 2011, 4:17 PM

Your friend branchredd@yahoo.com has shared a link with you.

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Army tests hypersonic weapon over the Pacific - Yahoo! News

http://news.yahoo.com/army-tests-hypersonic-weapon-over-pacific-025853085.html

The Army on Thursday conducted its first flight test of a new weapon capable of traveling five times the speed of sound.

Read the full story

Joe Frazier.....R.I.P.

2011-11-14T22:51:00.003-05:00

"In the clearing stands a boxer
And a fighter by his trade
And he carries a reminder
Of ev'ry glove that layed him down
Or cut him till he cried out
In his anger and his shame
'I am leaving, I am leaving'
But the fighter still remains"

Obama goes on another holiday....

2011-11-09T21:41:00.016-05:00

As if playing golf every weekend isn't enough time off in addition to his other vacations, readers of my blog know that although I've visited Hawaii as often as finances and health allow (and tried for years to get teaching work there), and have spent even more time when younger in Polynesie francais, even for a time being granted a carte de sejour (Residency) there, I've never been to Guam, but I continue to be moved by the overlooked plight of the people there as evidenced in the blog titled "The Drowning Mermaid" and the blog titled "Peace and Justice for Guam and the Pacific". Guam is officially a part of the U.S. Empire and continues to be decimated by our increasing military presence there. Because of protests in Okinawa and Korea, mostly having to do with continued rape by American military scum of young native girls (and children) in both places, and the closure of some bases there, Guam, to where the military is beginning to further relocate, suffers. Our only South Pacific colony, American Samoa, with a large navy base, has been almost culturally genocided by the encroachment of our "culture" - if one can call cheeseburgers and vulgarity, culture. Perhaps it is too late to save Guam from the same fate. However, I am appalled by Obama's going on yet another out of the U.S. holiday under the guise of meeting his fellow "leaders" - most no better than the dictators of China. First they all meet in Hawaii, obviously the preferred holiday spot for our President (a wonderful place to have grown up, but I do get a sense he was always an alienated outsider there - probably something like "repitition compulsion" working), for whom I have lost more and more respect as his time in office passes. Then he travels on to places like Bali and Australia (to firm up Australian support for the Afghan war) just as his wife travelled on taxpayer money (millions for the security detail alone) to Spain and India. & for what? To what end? Really, is he no better than the dimmest of all the right-wing dim bulbs, meglomaniac politicians and jejune hacks vying to replace him? Surely, he must be. Or is it all just the weapons trade and corporate Mammonism now.

(& this from the Honolulu Star-Advertizer (one of the daily newspapers): The managers of Iolani Palace objected to its closure during the gathering of Obama and the APEC oligarchs....22 protestors were arrested and removed from the grounds of the Palace and all workers summarily laid off during the time of the visit of Obama and the Asian dictators. These Hawaiians are supporters of the Sovereignty Movement in Hawaii - which continues to protest against the long continuing illegal seizure and annexation of the islands (before people there - though not a majority of native Hawaiian people, voted for statehood) and its militarization - the first incursion of the U.S. Empire outside of the mainland. It is the first serious secessionist movement since the Civil War. Obama never visits any island other than
Oahu, and always stays, when there, on the Kaneohe military complex (with its adjoining golf course) or at multi-million dollar vacation homes of his sponsors nearby.)

Advice to a Prophet by Richard Wilbur

2011-11-07T20:46:00.003-05:00

When you come, as you soon must, to the streets of our city,
Mad-eyed from stating the obvious,
Not proclaiming our fall but begging us
In God's name to have self-pity,

Spare us all word of the weapons, their force and range,
The long numbers that rocket the mind;
Our slow, unreckoning hearts will be left behind,
Unable to fear what is too strange.

Nor shall you scare us with talk of the death of the race.
How should we dream of this place without us?--
The sun mere fire, the leaves untroubled about us,
A stone look on the stone's face?

Speak of the world's own change. Though we cannot conceive
Of an undreamt thing, we know to our cost
How the dreamt cloud crumbles, the vines are blackened by frost,
How the view alters. We could believe,

If you told us so, that the white-tailed deer will slip
Into perfect shade, grown perfectly shy,
The lark avoid the reaches of our eye,
The jack-pine lose its knuckled grip

On the cold ledge, and every torrent burn
As Xanthus once, its gliding trout
Stunned in a twinkling. What should we be without
The dolphin's arc, the dove's return,

These things in which we have seen ourselves and spoken?
Ask us, prophet, how we shall call
Our natures forth when that live tongue is all
Dispelled, that glass obscured or broken

In which we have said the rose of our love and the clean
Horse of our courage, in which beheld
The singing locust of the soul unshelled,
And all we mean or wish to mean.

Ask us, ask us whether with the worldless rose
Our hearts shall fail us; come demanding
Whether there shall be lofty or long standing
When the bronze annals of the oak-tree close.

Alley Cat Allies @ www.alleycat.org.

2011-11-06T11:53:00.019-05:00

Spending half an hour or so trying to help clean and winterize (and trap and neuter) in support of the feral cat population under the boardwalk in atlantic city, one sees that it is not cats who are dirty, but we humans. sadly, more and more homeless people are choosing to sleep under the jersey shore boardwalks, even in winter, rather than go to a homeless shelter. people have always slept under atlantic city boardwalks, and since the advent of casinos, more and more atlantic city has become a place which "caters to losers." i've been living on this barrier island (absecon island) with atlantic city at the north end, and three small suburban beach towns, ventnor, margate, and longport, to the south, sharing the island, for over 15 years. it is the closest beach and ocean to philadelphia, where i was born and raised, and my parents used to bring me here as a child. i sold the old row house in the Feltonville section of Philadelphia my grandfather built, and where i grew up, and to where I retreated for almost a decade after my parents' deaths in the 1980's. it had by then become one of philadelphia's most "troubled" neighborhoods, though not a hard-core ghetto, just the usual working-class/lower middle-class place plagued for the past 25 years with steeet crime, graffiti even on trees, drive-by shootings, and all the trauma of inner city life. eventually, i moved to margate, buying a small one bedroom condo apartment. now i have to sell that as well and live frugally somewhere for the duration since my funds are disappearing, like so many others in America. the 1944 hurricane wiped out the boardwalk in margate and longport, and the decision was not to rebuild, so the many miles of boardwalk now extend from the inlet at the northern tip of the island down through atlantic city and ventnor. pressured by pork-barrel interests, the municipalities chose to allow the often incompetent "army core of engineers" to build artificial sand dunes between the boardwalk and the ocean in atlantic city and in ventnor in order to protect the casino interests (initially the casino executives wanted to tear down the entire boardwalk so as to more effectively keep people inside) and the multi-million-dollar beachfront homes. now the dunes block the views of ocean from the boardwalk while reducing ocean breezes, and providing, some have said, a home for rats (certainly for rubbish). most people downbeach from atlantic city are quite well-off: doctors, lawyers, dentists, entrepreneurs and ceo's, investment counselors and bankers, and who knows what. but you can still see the signs of hard times everywhere. the atlantic city violent crime endemic to the u.s., businesses closing down, property values diminishing, workers laid off, etc. most all previous mayors of atlantic city over the past 50 years or so have been indicted upon or even before leaving office, and some have served time in prison, so i would venture to say atlantic city is one of america's most corruption-ridden cities. (of course, in current tv programs extolling new jersey's crass subculture, we lap up the romanticization of crime and criminals and even the lack of signs of intelligent life in general.) the casinos only made it worse. corzine was the governor before christie. so far he has managed to avoid prison while accumulating his fortune over the years as former head of Goldman-Sachs and buying his way into the senate and governorship. the current governor, who has brought back deer culls and bear culls and the cull of wild birds in the local wetlands sanctuary (Forsythe wildlife refuge - a migration route safe stopover for thousands of birds (for thusands of years) flying south for the winter and returning in the spring) is, like most all politicians, a great friend to the very wealthy, and to hunters. on a personal level, he is the most obese politico since Taft, and i reckon he is bound to spontaneously combust someday, like the character named Krook in Dickens' Bleak House. once, when queried about his weight when so many on the planet are starving, he responded by saying people who work at IHOP or McDonalds, etc., have to have jobs and eat too. if one takes a hard look at new jersey's cities, like camden and others (even the state capitol, trenton), one sees the results of the total disgrace to governance brought about by christie and his predecessors. so obviously, animals and animal rights, are not exactly anyone's priority - except for the Marine Mammal Stranding Center in the Brigantine area of south jersey. the first cause i ever donated any money to, in a beginning attempt 45 years ago, to help stop the slaughter of baby seals in canada, still continues as cruel and unjustified murder. on the high seas, Sea Shepherd is more than worthy of our support, if you have an interest in these things. Sea Shepherd and not Greenpeace, is now most effective in trying to stop whale-hunting and other illegal activities. the Japanese are probably the worst offenders, especially in their shark-hunting, cutting off the fins of the shark and tossing them back in the ocean to die horrific deaths so they can swill their shark-fin soup. we kill millions of sharks every year, usually in this manner. oceans are often called "shark-infested" as if the sea were not their natural home. not to mention the concentration camps/extermination camps for turkeys and other creatures we gobble up. PETA is in my opinion the best large activist organization in support of the non-human life with which we share the planet. but the slaughter of rare animals just goes on, from Ohio to Africa (where poaching is unabated, the rhino being hunted to extinction for the supposed medicinal value of its horn, exported primarily to china and southeast asia). natural habitat is destroyed so that developers and their sponsors (as human advocates of Mammon are called) can construct more and more houses and golf-courses and gated communties primarily for the mega-rich. well, Alley-Cat Allies is a small (though now national) animal protection group doing what they can for the cat population in atlantic city. the number of animals being put-down in overcrowded and underfunded animal shelters is sickening. i'm not an eco-warrior, not even, i must shamefacedly admit, a vegetarian (though i must say it would be nice to have at least one vegetarian restaurant on this barrier island; there's not even one in all of atlantic county). some of new jersey's boardwalks are constructed with amazon rainforest wood, although this practice was in-part stopped by the persistence and hard work of local activists here, pointing out not simply other alternatives to amazon wood but noting how so-called civic leaders were lining their pockets with these import deals while causing not just grief, but contributing to the many murders of amazonian tribespeople by the logging industry there and their hitmen. i suppose i have pretty much given up on people as the years pass.... however, "something further may follow of this masquerade".....

a little light relief

2011-11-05T14:47:00.002-04:00

THE PURIST by Ogden Nash

I give you now Professor Twist,
A conscientious scientist.
Trustees exclaimed, "He never bungles!"
And sent him off to distant jungles.
Camped on a tropic riverside,
One day his missed his loving bride.
She had, the guide informed him later,
Been eaten by an alligator.
Professor Twist could not but smile
"You mean," he said, "a crocodile."

Robert Duncan

2011-10-12T21:03:00.004-04:00

re: politicians and Presidents and seekers of high office, an excerpt from "A Poem Beginning With A Line By Pindar"

...where among these did the power reside
that moves the heart? What flower of the nation
bride-sweet broke to the whole rapture?

...hear the factories of human misery turning out commodities.
For whom are the holy matins of the heart ringing?
Noble men in the quiet of morning hear
Indians singing the continent's violent requiem.

...hear the cries of men in meaningless debt and war.
Where among these did the spirit reside
that restores the land to productive order?

How sad "amid lanes and through old woods"
echoes Whitman's love for Lincoln!

SUNSET OF KALAUPAPA

2011-09-03T19:12:00.010-04:00

Sunset Of Kalaupapa by Sammy Kuahine

The Sunset of Kalaupapa
Smiles through the evening rain;
The tradewinds of Kalaupapa
Sing like an old refrain
There's music of romancing,
Moonlight and stars above;
Your magic charms, your dancing
Fill every night with love...

This snippet of lovely song is printed in Alan Brennert's 2003 novel, MOLOKA'I, a heartfelt and beautiful book, and although a traditional historical and sentimental fiction, far superior to most American novels of the past decade.

It is clearly well-researched, and uses as partial source material, an anthology of interviews with patients, THE SEPARATING SICKNESS (1979); and a wonderful autobiography: OLIVIA - MY LIFE OF EXILE IN KALAUPAPA (1988), by Olivia Robello Breitha, which moved me to tears when first I began reading it many years ago in Kaunakakai, and whose author is the dedicatee of W.S. Merwin's great and magisterial 300 page poem THE FOLDING CLIFFS.

There is still no vaccine to prevent Hansen's Disease, although antibiotics, now provided free by the World Health Organization, arrests its development in most cases. In 2010, there were still over 250,000 new cases reported worldwide and many many more unreported due to the stigma of this oldest affliction known to man. There remain over 10 million suffering from this disease. When it was imported from China, where it was endemic since earliest civilization there, Polynesians had no immunity to it, nor to the other plagues and blights visited upon them. King Kamehameha V created the settlement at Kalaupapa, with much pressure from American business inteests, to isolate the infected from the general population, the first boatload of exiles arriving in 1866. "Sunset Of Kalaupapa" Brennert writes in his "author's note" at the end of his novel, is "the only known musical composition by a Kalaupapa resident." Like Moa Tetua, the 19th century Tahitian poet who also suffered from Hansen's, and whose songs were translated by Samuel Elbert and Muriel Rukeyser (and four of which were published by Eliot Weinberger) Samson Kuahine was blind.

Powell & Montgomery

2011-08-30T16:35:00.005-04:00

Theories of War

Hemingway wrote
in Across The River
(maybe you have to be male
and of a certain age
to appreciate it, I
loved it, so did CCG
as I recall...

Monty wouldn't move
unless he had 8 to 1 advantage
& Powell upped that to beyond 10
or even 12 to 1 *

Chasen'd & wiser
he returns honorably
to criticize
Cheney

* i.e. doctrine of "overwhelming force"

ZIZEK (on liberalism and capitalism)

2011-08-19T21:16:00.031-04:00

from LIVING IN THE END TIMES BY SLAVOJ ZIZEK (Verso, London & New York, 2010)

For liberalism, at least in its radical form, the wish to submit peoples to an ethical ideal held to be universal is "the crime which contains all crimes," the mother of all crimes -it amounts to the brutal imposition of one's own view onto others, the cause of civil disorder. Which is why, if one wants to establish civil peace and tolerance, the first condition is to get rid of "moral temptation": politics should be thoroughly purged of moral ideals and rendered "realistic," taking people as they are, counting on their true nature, not moral exhortations....An anti-ideological and anti-utopian stance is inscribed into the very core of the liberal vision: liberalism conceives itself as a "politics of the lesser evil," its ambition is to bring about the "least worst society possible," thus preventing a greater evil....Such a view is sustained by a profound pessimism about human nature: man is a selfish and envious animal, and if one attempts to build a political system appealing to his goodness and altruism, the result will be the worst kind of human terror.....However, the liberal critique of the "tyranny of the Good" comes at a price: the more its program permeates society, the more it turns into its opposite. The claim to want nothing but the lesser evil, once asserted as the principle of the new global order, replicates the features of the very enemy it claims to be fighting....Behind all this lurks the ultimate totalitarian nightmare, the vision of a New Man who has left behind all the old ideological language....The tension internal to this project is discernible in the two aspects of liberalism, market liberalism and politcal liberalism. Jean-Claude Michea perspicuously links these two meanings of the term "right": the political Right insists on the market economy, the politically correct culturalized Left insists on the defense of human rights - often its sole remaining raison d'etre. Although the tension between these two aspects of liberalism is irreducible, they are nonetheless inextricably linked, like the two sides of the same coin....Today the meaning of "liberalism" moves between two opposed poles: economic liberalism (free-market individualism, opposition to strong state regulation, etc.) and political liberalism (with an accent on equality, social solidarity, permissiveness, etc.)....It is thus for necessary structural reasons that the "fight against discrimination" is an endless process which interminably postpones its final point: namely a society freed of all moral prejudices which, as Michea puts it, "would be on this very account a society condemned to see crimes everywhere."....What liberalism proposes is a value-neutral mechanism of rights, and so on, "a mechanism whose free play can automatically generate a desired political order, without at any point interpellating individuals into subjects." The nameless jouissance cannot be a title of interpellation proper; it is more a kind of blind drive with no symbolic value-form attached to it - all such symbolic features are temporary and flexible, which is why the individual is constantly called upon to "re-create" himself or herself. There is a problem with this liberal vision which every good anthropologist, psychoanalyst, or even perspicuous social critic is aware: it cannot stand on its own, it is parasitic upon some preceding form of what is usually referred to as "socialization" which it simultaneously undermines, thereby sawing off the branch on which it is sitting....This atomized society, in which we have contact with others without entering into proper relations with them, is the presupposition of liberalism....That is to say, whence comes the Stalinist drive-to-expand, the incessant push to increase productivity, to further "develop" the scope and quality of production? Here we should correct Heidegger: it comes not from some general will-to-power or will-to-technological domination, but from the inherent structure of capitalist reproduction which can survive only through its incessant expansion and for which this ever-expanding reproduction, not some final state, is itself the only true goal of the entire movement....Only in capitalism is exploitation "naturalized," inscribed into the functioning of the economy, and not the result of extra-economic pressure and violence. This is why, with capitalism, we enjoy personal freedom and equality: there is no need for explicit social domination, since domination is already implicit in the structure of the production process.

----------------------------------------------------------------

(& a personal footnote on how to turn a trillion dollar deficit into a surplus, create jobs, reduce the power of the greed-laden, and even restore a modest sense of u.s. exceptionalism as "the last best hope on the planet")

Cease all current wars immediately, keeping military might in reserve, and if necessary, employ in other ways, like overseeing proper food distribution to the world's starving millions.

Make it illegal for large corporations to outsource work overseas. (It would be fair to raise tax on corporations and the mega-rich back to what they were under Eisenhower or even Reagan (who is no right-wing icon when it comes to taxation levels on the wealthiest); however, there seems little point since tax lawyers, corporate accountants, et. al., would find loopholes.) To outsource continues to exploit people overseas by paying low wages, thus increasing the profits of the corporation and making other nations and peoples dependent on the greed of capitalist enterprise. (I note that multi-millionaires are now being called "job creators" when they used to be called greedy bosses or corporate criminals, and of course they create only that which brings more wealth to them. They have never been asked to prove they create jobs in the amount of hundreds of billions of dollars, which is the figure being bandied about.)

End all foreign aid to dictatorships (like Myammar and Saudi Arabia) and all countries where our tax dollars go into corrupt pockets and an increase of their military power.

Create a National Health Service making medical care a right not a privilege as every other civilized country on earth has done. (This would also reduce the power of large insurance companies - insurance being perhaps the biggest racket in America. A side effect also might be more who are dedicated healers entering the medical profession, not simply people in it for the money.)

And as an almost equally improbable happening, perhaps someday the Supreme Court will reverse Sierra Club v. Morton, making Justice Douglas' dissent, and Justice Blackmun's dissent as well, the majority opinion. ....I suppose it's not impossible. Plessy v. Ferguson was reversed after all.

(added on Oct. 11th/Oct.12th)

Of course, to change the nature of the callous corruption which rules the U.S., we might begin with educational priorities, not simply more teachers and smaller class sizes, but, at the top, abolish athletic scholarships, since most who attend college in this way cannot put two sentences together without spelling or grammatical mistakes. (I write from teaching experience in two large American universities.) In fact, in big-money sport no professional athlete should be making millions per annum. Why pay men (and women) high wages to play children's games. As Charles Olson had said: "It is an excuse for homosexual behavior in public." But then we wouldn't have lawyers and agents using others as they do, and overpaid sportscasters, and coaches, and an entire absurd system of billionaire owners. Glued to TV or mindless in stadiums, it is an opiate of the people, although as a few professional athletes have had the forthrightness to admit, it reduces violent crime rates, in much the same way that prostitution reduces rape rates. It is a sign of our immaturity as a nation. Our educational system is a laughing stock. Higher education should be free to those who qualify. However, we have always been an anti-intellectual nation, ever since the Republic became an Empire. In fact, I believe that those with more than a few million in assets should be put under house arrest (if we can find enough honest law enforcement) until it is ascertained that their money was earned honestly. Ah, but then doubtless we'd have more prison overcrowding and abuse. The infrastructure of the country could be rebuilt and millions of unemployed put to work, but then those who live off the backs of people in developing countries and here will cry "socialism" as if capitalism were mentioned or enshrined anywhere in the Constitution as America's path. We could outlaw manufacture and distribution of "weapons of mass destruction" but the truth is that people here don't think of a decent and fair society for the most part, only more loot and gadgets and toys and celebrity-worship to fill the void.

a poem by Philip Levine

2011-08-11T16:46:00.006-04:00

THE INVENTION OF THE FADO

"Our Miasma" the locals call it, city
of hills, old barrios, a great harbor.
The year is 1904, a war beginning
in the east. Deserters, anarchists, Jews
come for refuge. We could be among them -
though we aren't - men without women,
on fire with longing. I'll show you one,
my grandfather, Yusel Pryzkulnik, who performs
in the Cafe Tulipe. Look how he stands,
one hand thrust into his jacket pocket,
a cotton scarf around his throat, a gray fedora
tipped slightly back, and stares into the haze
of tobacco smoke and does not even blink.
You are not this man chanting Sephardic hymns,
you did not lose an older brother, dragged
off one dawn by the police in long gray coats
never to return, nor did you watch your father
hung for butchering a chicken on a Saint's Day.
He enters your life slowly, not in the song
that lingers above the drinkers, not in smoke
blown over water or salt spray or words
put down by me or even the whisper
of his own voice, raw, torn, and barely heard
above the roar of all the waiting wars.
Lisbon was his: the young - both rich and poor -
climbed the cobbled lanes of the Alfama
to wait for hours to hear the faint echo
of his private sorrows. Widows in black,
half-drunken sailors, men without mothers
went to hear music that was not music.
One day he was gone into no one knows what,
gone forever and the songs vanished with him.
Now, go to the mirror. Look: it's not you
as you thought you were, it's not me either,
it's not anyone we worked to become.
It's the spring of '99. The wild roses riot
along the fence, the lilacs are late
to cast their shades on the purple mounds
we bowed to, and again the dead have found
a way into the hearts we swore were stone.

(published in the UK in FIRE,(#21), edited by Jeremy Hilton, Oxfordshire, 2003)

Len Fulton

2011-08-02T11:47:00.004-04:00

Others have written on and noted the passing of poetry maven and activist Len Fulton. I'd just like to add a public footnote that although I never met him, I know his interests were wide-ranging indeed and he was always open to publishing explorations in arcane areas. In his "small press review" (volume 34, #7/8, 2002) he published an essay of mine as a "Guest Editorial" debunking claims of decipherment of the RongoRongo script of Rapa Nui (Easter Island). And early on in his Dustbooks venture, he published the wonderful book of poetry, NIGHT CONVERSATIONS WITH NONE OTHER (Dustbooks, 1977), by my dearly-missed friend, the great Indian-American poet Shreela Ray.

Amy Winehouse : in lieu of a Kaddish

2011-07-27T17:30:00.005-04:00

Amid the chaos of the final weeks of her life, Amy Winehouse could still be entrancing, writes Alexandra Topping

Alexandra Topping
Thursday July 28 2011
The Guardian

Sitting on the bar after closing time in her local in Camden, the lights dimmed and the doors locked, Amy Winehouse knew how to hold an audience, even before she became famous. After a night of drinks and laughter, she would perch her tiny frame on the bar, take up a guitar and sing.

"Everybody would just stop and be entranced," said Dougie Charles-Ridler, co-owner of the pub and long-time friend of the singer. In those days, Winehouse was a good-time girl with a big mouth and an attitude to match. "I remember when I first met her I asked what she did and she just said, 'I'm a jazz singer,' he said. "No one had ever given that response before."

But the picture friends paint of the woman she became is suffused with a different type of light. No longer able to chat to old friends undisturbed, or throw herself behind the bar to serve a few lucky punters, she would go into the pub on her own on a Monday or Tuesday, often in the quiet of an afternoon, stand in front of the jukebox and turn it up loud.

"Recently she'd always be with two bouncers rather than two friends," said veteran lads' mag journalist Piers Hernu, who had known Winehouse through friends and the Camden scene for years. "People wouldn't go up to her any more, she wouldn't talk to people. She just became increasingly alienated from her own world."

She was alone, it seems, for the last night of her life. During his 40-minute eulogy at her funeral on Tuesday her father, Mitch, said the singer had stayed in her Camden Square townhouse. After seeing a doctor for a routine appointment at around 8.30pm, she played drums and sang into the early hours, until her bouncer told her to keep it down. He heard her footsteps overhead for a while, then it went quiet. When he went to check on her in the morning she appeared to be sleeping, and it was only after checking again at 4pm on Saturday afternoon that he realised she was dead.

How she died remains unclear. A postmortem examination carried out on Monday proved inconclusive and, from the information released so far, the days leading up to her death seem relatively uneventful. On Friday she saw her boyfriend, the film director Reg Traviss, and they talked about the wedding they were going to. Winehouse was trying to decide what to wear. Her mother has said that at lunch on the same day the singer had seemed "out of it", but they had spent an enjoyable day together and among the last things her daughter had said was: "I love you, Mum."

On Wednesday, the last time Charles-Ridler saw her, she seemed in good spirits. "She jumped into my arms she hardly weighed anything and wrapped her legs around my waist," he said. Asking the singer if she was all right, he received a response that was typically Winehouse. "'Course I am, darlin'," she said, and walked off like Eric Morecambe.

The same night she made a surprise public appearance with her godchild, the 15-year-old soul singer Dionne Bromfield, at the Roundhouse. The video, if not painful, is uncomfortable viewing. Winehouse comes on stage and lifts Bromfield up with the force of her embrace. Then, dressed in skinny jeans and a black polo T-shirt she dances sporadically, turning to the drummer, laughing and turning away. When Bromfield briefly holds the microphone to Winehouse's mouth, she does not sing.

Some of Winehouse's appearances this year held promise for those desperate to see the singer back to her Grammy-winning best. During a five-date tour of Brazil in January some performances, such as a rendition of the Moulin Rouge song Boulevard of Broken Dreams gave a tantalising glimpse of the talent that had been obscured for many years. Then, after another stint in rehab in early June, Winehouse played a seven-song set to a small group of family and friends at London's 100 Club on 12 June. She was "coherent" and "back on form" according to according to one observer, while Mitch Winehouse, during his eulogy, called it a great night. "Her voice was good, her wit and timing were perfect," he said.

But then, just six days later, painfully, dramatically and very publicly Winehouse came tumbling off the wagon. On the first night of a "comeback" tour of Europe in Belgrade she appeared on stage an hour late. Visibly drunk, she seemed barely able to remember the lyrics she had written and was finally booed off stage by fans who had just wanted to hear her sing.

Days later her management cancelled the 12-date tour, saying the singer would be given "as long as it takes" to sort herself out. "Everyone was absolutely gobsmacked," a source close to the management told the Guardian. "The hotel had been told to remove all traces of alcohol, but what can you do? She is a 27-year-old woman and if an addict wants to get hold of alcohol, they will do."

Questions were asked about why Winehouse was touring, and why she had gone on stage, but those close to her had every reason to think she was "back on track" professionally, the source added. "There was no reason to expect a disaster, things had seemed on the up."

In recent days Raye Cosbert, Winehouse's manager from the Metropolis management company, and the co-president of Island Records, Darcus Beese, have taken pains to swat down reports that the shambolic performance had created a rift between them, issuing a statement saying they had always stood "shoulder to shoulder" to give Winehouse "our total support and all the love her huge talent and wonderful human spirit deserved".

But while few doubt that everyone in Winehouse's entourage label, management, family were doing their best to help her recovery, a source close to Universal, Island's mother label, said that after seeing the Serbia performance: "Everybody was shocked she was doing anything. It was very odd to us. Obviously it didn't help, it couldn't have."

Mitch Winehouse said this week that his daughter had been off hard drugs for three years, and was trying to tackle the alcohol problems that were so painfully apparent in Serbia.

"People focus on the drugs, but the biggest problem was Amy's alcoholism," said Hernu. "It had the worst effect on her little frame. It basically gave in."

Winehouse's addictions whether to drink, or the harder drugs that seemed to control her life for years have been played out in the public arena. The photographic documentation of her demons appear even more ghoulish now: Winehouse with her trademark black eyeliner swoops smeared across her face her pink ballerinas caked in blood and dirt and her then husband Blake Fielder-Civil's face covered in scratches in 2007; barefaced, distressed and wearing only a bra and jeans...

And her death, like her life, has been lit by the glare of dozens of camera flashes. At the messy and makeshift shrine outside Winehouse's home, with its vodka bottles and cigarette packets, flowers and portraits, some fans cried. Others took oddly awkward photographs of themselves outside the place where she spent her last hours.

One fan, waiting to watch her coffin go past outside Golders Green crematorium on Tuesday, said the incessant coverage had pulled fans closer to her. "We saw her deterioration every day, in every picture," said 18-year-old Amy Swan. "It was like we were on a journey with her. So many people just wanted her to get better."

But there were others who wanted her to play up to her hellraising image.

Musician Liam Bailey, who became friends with Winehouse after she signed him to her own label Lioness Records, described going to a Pete Doherty gig with her last year. "I was gobsmacked by the attention," he said. "There were people offering her drinks, saying they loved her, other people throwing stuff, saying things I don't want to repeat. And all the time the bullying from the paparazzi was horrendous."

Propping up the bar at the Hawley Arms, not a seething den of iniquity but rather a tastefully decorated, candle-lit pub with a rock'n'roll edge, Charles-Ridler said Winehouse could find no respite from it. "She couldn't go anywhere, it was always in her face," he said. "And she was the most anti-fame person. She could play in front of 60,000 people and then be in here, and much happier, pulling pints the next night."

The fact that she could no longer do that added to her isolation, said Hernu. "Coming back to England, London and more specifically to Camden didn't seem to work for her," he said. "She couldn't do what she loved which was bouncing around Camden talking to everyone. She was bored and she was lonely."

The analysis of what caused her eventual demise, on Saturday 23 July, aged 27, will be dissected minutely over the coming weeks. But, said Charles-Ridler, those who peered into her life should also take a moment to look at their own.

"Yes she did this to herself, yes she was self-destructive, but she was a victim too," he said. "We all have to take a bit of responsibilty, us the public, the paparazzi. She was a star, but I want people to remember that she was also just a girl."

The Tree Of Life

2011-07-18T07:51:00.006-04:00

If you are homosexually inclined, especially if you fancy young boys, this is the film for you. An experiment in narrative, it rips off the "new American cinema" of the 1960's, most notably Bruce Conner's Cosmic Ray, Ed Emshwiller, and the work of Stan Brakhage. It also plagiarizes freely from Truffaut's Les Quatre Cent Coups, and even offers digital dinosaurs to adults who are intellectually challenged. The acting is almost non-existent, Brad Pitt unconsciously parodying his best work in, say, Fight Club. Set in Waco, Texas, home turf for the director Terence Malick (who got his start studying with the gay academic philosopher Stanley Cavell), its time frame is decades before the FBI early Clinton years burning of the cult there, and the churchy depression-years characters, including the aggressive and generally horrible little Freudian urchins, are all death-in-life American rural lower middle class noir. The visual pomposity, particularly the underwater work, highly influenced by the late-life photography of Leni Riefenstahl, often is stunning, although the huge amounts of money spent on the film could clearly have been better spent feeding thousands of starving people and used for vaccination against disease in the Third World. Everything in the film is derivative, from Sean Penn's corporate Alphaville to the oh-so-clever sign reference to Kevin Spacey. In the end, all the characters are transported Rapturelike to the director's image of la-la land. Like Spielberg's ET or Cameron's Avatar and other idiocies which have contributed to the dumbing down of America, Tree is really a good reason to support Godard's view of the crumbling of what was greatness in Hollywood pre- and post WWII cinema, and a good reason to see Jean-Luc's Film Socialisme.

Stevie Smith (1902 -1971)

2011-06-26T00:40:00.040-04:00

Looking at the fine poems Tom Clark has posted of Stevie Smith's work on his blog, Beyond The Pale, I had additional thoughts which then I realized were too cumbersome for even several comment boxes, so, although I am not as head-over-heels with Stevie, I do think she may just be the best of female English poets of the last century. (Although Denise Levertov once said to me: "At heart, I'm English".) Not that I wish to create thoughts of hierarchy, and there are 20th century American women poets who for me are "better" - broader in scope, in innovation. However, what Stevie did was to meld English "insouciance" with sardonicisms worthy of Bukowski, Dorothy Parker, Philip Larkin. Glenda Jackson, who portrayed her on the London stage and later in the film, "Stevie" did the best job of portraying a poet in film I can remember seeing. Smith's work is almost polar opposite to, say, the later work of American transatlantic poet H.D., and her greatest poem "Winter Love".

Smith's most famous poem is the brilliant "Not Waving But Drowning". She could be quite nasty, and this shines through, for example, in the 4 line anti-American poem "The Little Daughters of America" which condescending and snide tone was typical of the English sensibility from 1939 to Pearl Harbor. And even to this day. But her genius in her use of Englsh tone and diction makes the 4 liner into something amusing and yet not.

Admirals Curse-You and No-More
Set their compasses and sailed for war.

I am sorry that all the little daughters of America
Should be involved in a thing like this; upon my word.

She could be equally nasty to her own countrywomen. "This Englishwoman" is a 2 liner:

This Englishwoman is so refined
She has no bosom and no behind.

Like Patchen, she accompanies most of her poems with whimsical but hard-edged drawings, often as wry as the poems themselves.

She can, on the one hand, be capable of compassion, and when she turns her use of diction to this end, the result is moving in the most rational and most extraordinarily quintessential English way. Here for example, is the close, her "Envoi" as she calls it, of "A Soldier Dear to Us":

Tommy and Joey Porteous were killed in France. Now fifty years later
Basil has died of the shots he got in the shell crater
The shrapnel has worked its way round at last to his merry heart,
I write this
For a memorial of the soldier dear to us he was.

Bitterness and psychic pain were modes she understood, note the poem "I Forgive You" and its revelations of resentment and pride, and condemnations of same encoded in the tone. In the drawing of the poem, Stevie has the woman lying on her sofa/bed in a state, and the man, frowning/unsmiling, sits on a small chair and says to her:

I forgive you, Maria,
Things can never be the same,
But I forgive you, Maria,
Though I think you were to blame.
I can never forget
But I forgive you, Maria,
Kindly remember that.

Then there is this, "The Broken Heart":

He told me he loved me,
He gave me red roses,
Twelve crimson roses
As red as my blood.

The roses he gave me,
The roses are withered,
Twelve crimson roses
As red as my blood.

The roses are withered,
But here on my breast, far
Redder than they is
The red of my heart's blood.

He told me he loved me,
He gave me red roses,
Twelve crimson roses
As red as my blood.

She withdrew considerably in her life, living with her aunt and their cats (of whom she wrote lovingly in her trademark quirky manner). Here, in "My Cats" she seems to morph into a witch:

I like to toss him up and down
A heavy cat weighs half a Crown
With a hey do diddle my cat Brown.

I like to pinch him on the sly
When nobody is passing by
With a hey do diddle my cat Fry.

I like to ruffle up his pride
And watch him skip and turn aside
With a hey do diddle my cat Hyde.

Hey Brown and Fry and Hyde my cats
That sit on tombstone for your mats.

She and her "lion Aunt" lived in a semi-detached house at the end of a row of houses, in what was then a NE London straight-laced suburb. Born in Hull (Yorkshire), her father left to pursue a career at sea, and her mother died when Stevie and her older sister were quite young. Her aunt raised her, moving the family to Avondale Road, Palmers Green. "A House Of Mercy" Stevie calls it. Here are three stanzas from the poem:

It was a house of female habitation,
Two ladies fair inhabited the house,
And they were brave. For although fear knocked loud
Upon the door, and said he must come in,
They did not let him in.

There were also two feeble babes, two girls,
That Mrs. S. had by her husband had,
He soon left and went away to sea,
Nor sent them money, nor came home again
Except to borrow back
His Naval Officer's Wife's Allowance from Mrs S.
Who gave it to him at once, she thought she should.

Now I am old and I tend my mother's sister
The noble aunt who so long tended us.
Faithful and True her name is. Tranquil.
Also Sardonic. And I tend the house.

She chose not to meet up (at least not in time) with Sylvia Plath, one of her great fans, who had written to her in Nov. 1962; just a few months later Plath was gone. No one really cared for Plath that winter in London; she was just thought of as the ditsy American wife of the poet Larkin called "The Hulk". The poem "Mabel" is undoubtedly about Plath, written shortly after her suicide:

In her loneliness Mabel
Found the hiss of the umlit gas
Companionable
And in a little time, dying
Sublime.

Stevie lost all of her Jewish friends after the publication, pre-world war 2, of "Novel On Yellow Paper" due to the careless and perhaps not even conscious anti-semitism which was then and now so ingrained in the English sensibility (brilliantly delineated by Philip Roth in his "Christendom" chapter of his novel "The Counterlife"). She insisted she never meant anything by it.

In "Voice From The Tomb #4" she wrote, echoing Dickinson at the beginning, with a touch of Sir Thomas Wyatt at the close:

I died for lack of company
Did my dear friends not know?
Oh why would they not speak to me
Yet said they loved me so?

She claimed she wanted interruption from her solitude in her discursive longish poem "Thoughts about the Person from Porlock" offering aesthetic distance from her loneliness in her bemused thoughts of Coleridge. Other exceptional narratives include "The Frog Prince" which inverts the fairy-tale/myth, and "Angel Boley" which deals with child murder, based on a 1966 case. The pathos of failed love is a recurrent theme, as in "Pad,pad":

I always remember your beautiful flowers
And the beautiful kimono you wore
When you sat on the couch
With that tigerish crouch
And told me you loved me no more.

What I cannot remember is how I felt when you were unkind
All I know is, if you were unkind now I should not mind.
Ah me, the power to feel exaggerated, angry and sad
The years have taken from me. Softly I go now, pad pad.

As Frances Spaulding points out in her excellent "critical biography" titled simply "Stevie Smith" (Faber and Faber, 1988), she was drawn out of isolation in the 1960's, more often than not by Michael Horovitz, to read at his various events and gatherings of a Bohemian nature often bringing poetry and jazz into closer communion. As Spaulding also notes, she was able to "imbue her work with, Seamus Heaney argues, 'a sense of pity for what is infringed and unfulfilled.' The tragic note sounded in her work is, however, made buoyant by a humour that keeps despair at bay; breezy commonsense, shrewdness and stoicism combat melancholy. Nevertheless her stark moral sense denied her comforting illusions and drove her to confront stupidity and cruelty, loneliness and loss." The poems "invite laughter" but they "are not frivolous" - are "dechirant" as the critic for "The Listener" (17 October 1957) remarked, and it is not surprising that "no amount of sociability could veil her isolation."

And at the end of her life, in what we would call hospice, suffering from a brain tumor:

I feel ill. What can the matter be?
I'd ask God to have pity on me
But I turn to the one I know, and say:
Come, Death, and carry me away.

Ah me, sweet Death, you are the only god
Who comes as a servant when he is called, you know,
Listen then to this sound I make, it is sharp,
Come Death. Do not be slow.

Remembering Mike Waterson, a born storyteller

2011-06-22T18:49:00.008-04:00

guardian.co.uk

To see this story with its related links on the guardian.co.uk site, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2011/jun/22/mike-waterson-remembered (by Colin Irwin)

Remembering Mike Waterson, a born storyteller

The singer, who died on Tuesday, had a passionate belief in folk song as a voice for the true values of the working class

guardian.co.uk

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2011/jun/22/mike-waterson-remembered by Colin Irwin.....

Anybody with even a passing interest in British folk music will be choked by news of the death of Mike Waterson, who passed away on Tuesday.

Not only was he one of the great interpreters of traditional song, throwing himself into a narrative with all the mannerisms and instinctive inflections of a born storyteller, he was a master of wordplay, writing what he would self-effacingly describe as "ditties", whether Rubber Band ("We're the band to catapult to stardom/ We'll never get wound up, we're never slack") from his classic 1972 album Bright Phoebus with sister Lal; or the celebrated A Stitch in Time, inspired by a newspaper story he'd read that describes, in delicious detail, the highly ingenious revenge of a battered wife who sews her drunken husband into his bed while he's asleep.

Even last August, already looking alarmingly frail on one of his final stage appearances at the Waterson family's emotional homecoming gig at Hull's Truck Theatre, he still managed to steal the show when baggy brown jumper, trademark flat cap, pint of ale in hand he giggled like a naughty schoolboy and sang his latest masterpiece Tea's Made, hilariously pillorying drinks machines: "The milk is in small saches that you can't get in no-how/ And it tastes of burning plastic and it's never seen a cow/ So do not use this cafe/ Join the picket line with me/ Then they'll have to find a robot/ To drink their fucking tea. "

In the obituaries that will follow over the next few days, Mike will quite rightly be heralded as one of the key figures of the British folk revival for his long-running role in the Watersons, the Yorkshire singing family whose dynamic voices and instinctive harmonies galvanised the nascent folk scene back in the day and whose early career was guided by the great folklorist Bert Lloyd. "He asked us to sing a song once, which we did, and then he asked us to sing it again," Mike told me, recalling early days with his sisters Lal and Norma. "When he asked us to do it yet again we said are we doing it wrong? He said: 'No, it's pure indulgence because it's giving me so much enjoyment.' He told us we had wonderful mixolydian harmonies. We all looked at eachother and when we got home we went to Hull Library to find out what it meant."

With his long dark hair, sullen looks and scrawny physique, he was the coolest looking bloke on the planet back then. Check out the brilliant Derrick Knight documentary Travelling for a Living from 1965 and you'll see a dude who makes Liam Gallagher look like Val Doonican. No wonder the Watersons were dubbed "the folk Beatles". But, like the rest of his family, Mike never had any interest in fame or celebrity. He was a great singer with a passionate belief in folk song as a voice for the true values of working-class men and women and his main motivation was to put that music back in the hands of local communities. When the rigours of touring took its toll, he was quite happy to give it all up to paint houses and build boats, quietly knocking out his "ditties", living in a farmhouse in north Yorkshire and rejoining the family on their odd musical adventure.

A couple of years I spent a magical afternoon with Mike and Norma Waterson in Robin Hood's Bay where the pair of them bickered affectionately about everything under the sun, from rising stars of the modern folk scene to widely divergent memories of Eliza Ward, the grandmother who raised them after their parents both died young. The anecdotes were long and rambling, the images colourful and vivid and the opinions sharp and passionate. And now Norma is slowly recovering from major illness and Mike is gone. It's good to know a new generation of Waterson-Carthys has emerged to carry the baton, but the sense of loss today is still immeasurable.

Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Pasternak

2011-06-20T11:37:00.012-04:00

Could Pasternak have saved Mandelstam from his arrest and exile which broke his physical and perhaps his mental health even prior to the extremes of poverty he and his wife suffered after his release and before his second arrest and subsequent death in 1938? Anna Akhmatova is ambivalent on this point but wonders about it in her essay on Mandelstam in MY HALF CENTURY, her selected prose, (Ardis Publishers, Ann Arbor, 1992).

"At the close of his letter to Stalin, Bukharin wrote: 'And Pasternak is worried as well.' Stalin stated that an order had been issued so that everything would be put right for Mandelstam. Stalin asked Pasternak why he hadn't exerted himself on Mandelstam's behalf, saying, 'If my friend were in trouble, I would do everything to help him.' Pasternak replied that if he hadn't done anything, Stalin would not have found out about the matter. 'But why didn't you turn to me or to the writers' organizations?' 'The writers' organizations haven't been involved in matters like this since 1927.' 'But isn't he your friend?' Pasternak hesitated and after a brief pause Stalin continued his queston, 'But he's a master, isn't he?' Pasternak answered, 'That's beside the point.' Pasternak thought that Stalin was testing whether he knew about the poems and that was his explanation for his shaky answers. 'Why are we spending all our time talking about Mandelstam? I've wanted to have a chat with you for a long time.' 'About what?' 'About life and death.' And Stalin hung up." (pp. 102-103)

She goes on to say (footnoted p. 375) that "Everything about this phone call requires the utmost scrutiny." Akhmatova also notes that Zina, Pasternak's wife, "hated the Mandelstams with a passion and thought they had compromised her 'loyal husband.' "

Well, who knows what one would do in a situation when you could be imprisoned, tortured, killed. Pasternak may well have been trying to save his own skin, in addition to aggrandizing himself and insinuating himself further into Stalin's good graces. It happens all the time, this cowardice, dissembling, back-scratching, brown-nosing among writers and poets, reference the recent controversies surrounding the actions of the young Milan Kundera. Or the egregious example of Gunter Grass in his Waffen SS days.

Or the refusal of poets in London to help organzise, provide a venue for, or even, out of fear, attend any readings in support of Salman Rushdie after the fatwa was issued.

W.B. Yeats, WHAT THEN; G.M. Hopkins, SPRING AND FALL

2011-06-12T00:01:00.004-04:00

(Here's a poem by Yeats, written 1937, which speaks to me.)

His chosen comrades thought at school

He must grow a famous man;

He thought the same and lived by rule,

All his twenties crammed with toil;

"What then?" sang Plato's ghost. "What then?"

Everything he wrote was read,

After certain years he won

Sufficient money for his need,

Friends that have been friends indeed;

"What then"? sang Plato's ghost. "What then?"

All his happier dreams came true -

A small old house, wife, daughter, son,

Grounds where plum and cabbage grew,

Poets and Wits about him drew;

"What then?" sang Plato's ghost. "What then?"

'The work is done,' grown old he thought,

'According to my boyish plan;

Let the fools rage, I swerved in naught,

Something to perfection brought' ;

But louder sang that ghost, "What then?"

and this, by Hopkins (with thanks to C.F. for reminding me of this poem decades ago)

SPRING AND FALL

to a young child

MARGARET, are you grieving
Over goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no not mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Camille Claudel

2011-05-31T13:55:00.005-04:00

Auden, schoolboy Marxist, writes that he "pardons" Paul Claudel, and doubtless thought nothing of his idol, Eliot, imprisoning Vivienne in an insane asylum for life, as did Claudel his sister. Hugh MacDiarmid, in a different context, wrote:

In spite of all their kind some elements of worth
With difficulty persist here and there on earth.

i.m. Marie Balvet