Most of the poets read at this session were American, barring three famous Englishmen (Byron, Tennyson and Kipling), an Irishman (Gogarty), a Greek (Cavafy), and an Indian (Hoskote). The poetry was rich and varied, and gave rise to much discussion.
George Gordon Noel Byron, 6th Baron Byron by Richard Westall © National Portrait Gallery, London
The world is beset by several crises at the moment. The extreme cruelty of the deliberate slow murder by asphyxiation of George Floyd by a policeman in Minneapolis, has given rise to reactions around the globe against racism. This is partly reflected in the discussions below of two poets on opposites sides of that divide: James Baldwin and Rudyard Kipling.
James Baldwin – 1963 portrait by Richard Avedon
The Covid-19 crisis also found its way into our discussions when the role of policing in general was discussed. Too often the police is seen as an instrument for political coercion. If the government has not earned the trust of its people, by acting in the public good, in turn the public will hold back from cooperating with the policies of the government.
Rudyard Kipling
One of our readers (Geeta) raised the point about what constitutes 'literary value’ in a piece of writing, and how do you assess it. It comes into play when KRG readers select novels for the year’s reading. It was essential to the famous case of the obscenity charge against the novel Ulysses. The disposal of the case with the finding against the charge, established once and for all that a work of literary merit will not be treated by the law as an obscenity.
James Joyce
For lovers of literature the manner in which the Judge John M. Woolsey arrived at his decision in December 1933 has a certain piquancy in its phrasing:
“I am quite aware that owing to some of its scenes Ulysses is a rather strong draught to ask some sensitive, though normal, persons to take. But my considered opinion, after long reflection, is that whilst in many places the effect of Ulysses on the reader undoubtedly is somewhat emetic, nowhere does it tend to be an aphrodisiac. Ulysses may, therefore, be admitted into the United States.”
Emetic, but not aphrodisiac.
As before we are under a Covid-19 sentence of social distancing and had to congregate in a virtual manner with Zoom. Here we are:
Full Account and Record of the Session on June 26, 2020
The next session of Poetry will be in August for our annual session on the Romantic Poets.
The Kochi Police Commissioner has permitted 15 to 20 people to meet in a place, preserving social distancing and wearing masks, according to Kavita. Arundhaty suggested we can meet at 2pm in the afternoon. Priya said she is retiring next year.
Sat July 25th afternoon, if it’s not raining, is the date for reading the novel One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest – to be confirmed closer to the date.
What about lunch? We have missed a lot of teas in the past. Arundhaty invited readers to her place and Kavita said it can be a potluck affair. A balaclava and a swimming trunk for KumKum sitting outside, suggested Arundhaty. A face bikini and the other bikini also.
Arundhaty
Arundhaty
Biography of Ranjit Hoskote (born 1969) is a well-known contemporary poet in India, writing in English. He was born in 1969 in Bombay and educated in Mumbai at Scottish School and Elphinstone College, finishing with an MA in English Litt from the University of Bombay. He is a poet, cultural theorist, curator.
Ranjit Hoskote plays all roles with equal prowess. Having authored more than thirty books, ranging across poetry, art criticism, cultural theory and translation, Ranjit Hoskote has duly earned himself a distinct place in the country’s contemporary arts scene.
He has published three collections of poetry, co-translated Marathi poet Vasant Dahake’s work into English, and edited an anthology of fourteen contemporary Indian poets. He writes in English.
His influences have been eclectic, and he acknowledges his debt to writers as diverse as Wallace Stevens, Brodsky, Montale, Dom Moraes, Agha Shahid Ali, Bhartrihari and Jayadeva, to name a random few.
Ranjit Hoskote, poet, Bombay-born in 1969
Hoskote has received the Sanskriti Award for Literature (1996) and the British Council/ Poetry Society of India Annual Competition (1997). In 2004, the national academy of letters honoured him with the Sahitya Akademi Golden Jubilee Award.
He worked on translations of Bhartrihari from the Sanskrit, Lal Ded (the medieval Kashmiri woman mystic), and also worked on a critical biography of Jehangir Sabavala, the artist. He read a great deal of Kabir and American poetry, especially Adrienne Rich, Jori Graham, James Merrill. In 1995, he went to the International Writing Program in Iowa, and met many of the poets he had read – from Mark Strand to Louise Gluck.
In an interview with Arundhaty Subramaniam he says “I began to grow more interested in ways of expressing the speaking voice. I began to see the importance of setting the self in a historical framework, without letting it turn autobiographical in a maudlin or confessional manner. And I grew increasingly fascinated by the game of trying out various identities: I’ve always been attracted to the persona of the spy, the interpreter, the double agent. Perhaps it has something to do with being a poet among critics, a critic among poets, a theorist among curators.”
(Refs:
Commentary
As Arundhaty started speaking her dog began barking, and one was reminded of the line in The Merchant of Venice:
And when I ope my lips, let no dog bark!
Joe raised the matter of Trappist monks adverted to in the lines:
An ambassador in an enemy country
must practise the austerities
of fable. He sees what he sees
through the Trappist eye
of the needle.
Trappists did not invent the expression ‘the eye of the needle’ which is there in the Talmud, and more graphically in a saying of Jesus, “it is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich man to enter the kingdom of God.” And what are the austerities, Joe wondered, that an ambassador practises – more likely they lead lavish lives with all the diplomatic advantages of ample funds to throw parties and invite lords and ladies. So it’s not a metaphor that sits well, and you can wonder what Hoskote was thinking of. Ambassadors require a lot of skill to negotiate, according to Arundhaty. They have to be well-read in literature, and have a deep appreciation of archival history so as to have an understanding of the country to which they are posted.
Priya said she has spoken with Hoskote.
Devika
Devika
Biography of Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809 – 1893)
Alfred Tennyson was born in 1809, 4th of 12 children. He was raised in a lonely rectory. Although home conditions were difficult, his father the Rector, managed to give his children a wide literary education. He showed an early talent for writing and at the age of 12 wrote a 6000 word epic poem.
The Lincolnshire countryside inspired his poetry which was rich in imagery and verbal melody. It dealt with doubts and difficulties of an age in which traditional belief about human nature and destiny were increasingly called to question by science and modern progress. Many of his poems are about the temptation to give up and fall prey to pessimism but they also extoll the virtues of optimism and importance of struggling on with life.
His two elder brothers wrote poetry too and when he was not quite 18, his first volume of poetry was published. It was called Poems by Two Brothers. Alfred Tennyson wrote the major part of the poetry with some contributions from his elder brothers.
He escaped from home in 1927 to enter Trinity College, Cambridge where he made everlasting friendships and his reputation as a poet increased. He became close friends with Arthur Hallam, Hallam was an important influence on Tennyson, encouraging him in his literary endeavours. His early death in 1833, when Tennyson was just 22 was quite a shock.
Unfortunately, he could not get his degree as his father died leaving a pile of debts. His grandfather who was a well-known solicitor and a man of means disowned Alfred’s fathers’ debts.
Alfred Lord Tennyson
He was the Poet Laureate during much of Queen Victoria's reign and remains one of the most popular British poets. In 1829, Tennyson was awarded the Chancellor's Gold Medal at Cambridge for one of his first pieces, "Timbuktu". One of his most famous poems was In Memoriam, an enormous critical and popular success. It was a favourite of Queen Victoria who was “soothed & pleased” by it after the death of her husband Prince Albert. It is considered one of the great poems of the 19th century.
In May 1836, his brother Charles married Louisa Sellwood of Horncastle, and at the wedding Alfred fell in love with her sister Emily. For some years, the lovers corresponded, but Emily’s father disapproved of Tennyson because of his bohemianism, addiction to port and tobacco, and liberal religious views; and in 1840 he forbade the correspondence. Meanwhile the Tennysons had left Somersby and were living a rather wandering life nearer London. It was in this period that Tennyson made friends with many famous men, including the politician William Ewart Gladstone, the historian Thomas Carlyle, and the poet Walter Savage Landor.
In May 1836, his brother Charles married Louisa Sellwood of Horncastle, and at the wedding Alfred fell in love with her sister Emily. For some years, the lovers corresponded, but Emily’s father disapproved of Tennyson because of his bohemianism, addiction to port and tobacco, and liberal religious views; and in 1840 he forbade the correspondence. Meanwhile the Tennysons had left Somersby and were living a rather wandering life nearer London. It was in this period that Tennyson made friends with many famous men, including the politician William Ewart Gladstone, the historian Thomas Carlyle, and the poet Walter Savage Landor.
The year 1850 marked a turning point. Tennyson resumed his correspondence with Emily Sellwood, and their engagement was renewed and followed by marriage. After his marriage, which was happy, Tennyson’s life became more secure and outwardly uneventful. There were two sons: Hallam and Lionel. The times of wandering and unsettlement ended in 1853, when the Tennysons took a house, Farringford, in the Isle of Wight.
Tennyson wrote of Farringford, the manor house which he initially rented, and then purchased after 3 years. After a point he found that there were too many star-struck tourists in that area, so moved to a stately home in West Sussex. However, he came back to Farringford every winter
“Where, far from noise and smoke of town
I watch the twilight falling brown,
All round a careless-ordered garden,
Close to the ridge of a noble down.”
I watch the twilight falling brown,
All round a careless-ordered garden,
Close to the ridge of a noble down.”
Tennyson – Farringford House, Isle of Wight
On October 6, 1892, an hour or so after midnight, he died at Aldworth with the moon streaming in at the window overlooking the Sussex Weald, his finger holding open a volume of Shakespeare, his family surrounding the bed. A week later he was buried in the Poets’ Corner of Westminster Abbey, near the graves of Browning and Chaucer. To most of England it seemed as if an era in poetry had passed, a divide as great as that a decade later when Queen Victoria died.
The Charge Of The Light Brigade
Tennyson’s poem Charge of the Light Brigade epitomised many aspects of Victorian society and the patriotism of the day. It holds up the ideal of courage and patriotism in the face of overwhelming danger and the horrors of war. It is a celebration of heroic failure
The ten-minute charge of the Heavy Brigade would doubtless had been more famous in history had it not been for the calamity that ensued a couple hours later. Lord Raglan, overall commander of British forces, had gained a good vantage point over the whole area of the battle. He observed the Russians moving artillery from the captured redoubts on the Vorontsov heights and sent orders for the Light Brigade—lancers, hussars, and light dragoons—under the command of Lord Cardigan, to disrupt the operation. Raglan phrased the order, “ . . . advance rapidly to the front, follow the enemy, and try to prevent the enemy from carrying away the guns.” However, by the time the order reached Cardigan, it had passed between several commanders and had been shortened to “advance rapidly.” Cardigan thought the order was absurd, attacking in a valley surrounded by Russian artillery and forces on three sides instead of attacking the isolated Russians on the surrounding heights, but he had to obey what he thought were Raglan’s wishes. He led a charge straight down the centre of North Valley to attack the Russian artillery battery sited there. The brigade advanced slowly at first and then at full charge, all the time fired on by the Russian guns on the heights as well as the battery in front of them. The allies had suffered heavy losses by the time they reached the Russian battery, where they were also threatened by a counterattack from the Russian cavalry. Lord Raglan, watching the charge from a distance, sensing the hopelessness of the situation, and wanting to stem his losses, then halted his Heavy Brigade from following in the wake of the Light Brigade’s charge, thereby denying the Light Brigade any second-wave backup. The Russians noticed this and swept down from the valley’s surrounding heights. The Light Brigade was now virtually encircled. The Light Brigade noticed as well that the Heavy Brigade had not followed in support, and in fierce battle with sabers and hand-to-hand combat, the survivors from the charge battled gallantly through the Russian line behind them in a desperate retreat. Out of more than 600 men who had embarked on the charge, 110 were killed, about 130 were wounded, and another 30 or so wounded and captured; some 375 horses had also been killed or were destroyed afterward.
Battle of Balaklava - The charge of the Light Brigade, Crimean War, Oct 25, 1854
Battle of Balaklava - The charge of the Light Brigade at the Battle of Balaklava, Crimean War, October 25, 1854.
The movie Charge of the Light Brigade is loosely woven around the story of the Battle of Balaklava.
References to Source Material:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred,_Lord_Tennyson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farringford_House
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/alfred-tennyson
https://poets.org/poet/alfred-lord-tennyson
References to Source Material:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred,_Lord_Tennyson
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Farringford_House
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/alfred-tennyson
https://poets.org/poet/alfred-lord-tennyson
Commentary
Devika even now can recall the emotions this poem evoked in her at school, forty plus years ago. She really loved it. It is very sad at the end. According to her
1. It teaches obedience to a superior. If a teacher says something you obey, even if you have another opinion.
2. It embodies the concept of the game of Chinese Whispers from which we learn how a message gets garbled in transmission from one person to another.
In this case a long message to reconnoitre the emplacement of naval guns located somewhere else, so as to prevent them from being moved into battle, gets ultimately shortened to an order to attack the artillery frontally! And the Light Brigade rode into an ambush. One thing it teaches is even in our daily lives to be very specific about the action you want done, said Devika.
Joe was not aware before Devika mentioned that young girls in school liked to recite the The Charge of the Light Brigade. It seemed to be a made-for-boys kind of poem. But the girls recognised the pathos, whereas for guys it was the sheer madness and clamour accompanying the charge, the booming of cannons, the thundering of hooves, etc. that caught their imagination. They hardly thought of death. For them it was Glory, not Pathos.
Here are the dramatic personae:
Earl of Cardigan – commander of the Light Brigade of Cavalry, a unit meant for reconnaissance and light skirmishes. There was also a separate Heavy Cavalry with more armour and bigger horses.
Earl of Lucan – Commander of all Cavalry, light and heavy
Lord Raglan – Army Commander at the top
Raglan wanted the light cavalry to manoeuvre to ward off the Russians from repositioning the naval guns from the hill on the south side of the valley. The order was drafted and sent in writing through a Captain by the name of Nolan; this captain added the unauthorised oral instruction that the cavalry were to attack immediately (this was not part of the original order).
When Earl Lucan who commanded all the cavalry got the order he asked which guns were referred to, and instead of the heavy naval guns on the south side of the valley, the Captain spreading his arms pointed to the cannon arrayed at them on three sides.
Earl Lucan then relayed the instruction to the commander of the Light Brigade under him, Earl Cardigan, to lead his command of 670 horsemen straight into the valley. The enemy cannon were at a height and had a mile-long view of the ensuing charge. This became the ‘Valley of Death’ Tennyson refers to in the poem.
Cardigan survived the massacre, although he led the charge, and having fought, returned alone. He was satisfied he had done all that he could. He left the field and it is reported he enjoyed a champagne dinner that night aboard his yacht in Balaclava harbour in the insouciant manner befitting a gentleman warrior. Cardigan returned to Britain as a hero and was promoted to Inspector General of the Cavalry.
They say Captain Nolan who misread the order, and did not deliver the written order of Raglan but only communicated orally, and furthermore pointed to the wrong guns to be attacked, would have been court-martialled had he survived. But he was among the first to fall in action.
A Frenchman, Marshal Pierre Bosquet commented on the action: “C’est magnifique, mais ce n'est pas la guerre. C'est de la folie.” – It’s terrific, but it’s not war. It’s madness.
It is reported that Tennyson wrote his famous poem within minutes of reading about the battle in The Times three weeks later. It became a very popular. Its nationalistic fervour covered the action in glory, while acknowledging the blunder at its base. The poem was sent to the soldiers serving in the Crimean War as a pamphlet.
A footnote. Joe recalls from his mother’s old knitting books that the names Raglan, Cardigan, and Balaclava were all well-known to knitters:
Cardigan: A knitted woollen jacket with buttons up the front, named after Lord Cardigan
Raglan: a style of knitting sweaters in which the sleeve is in one piece with the shoulder (instead of being knitted separately and attached by stitching). Named after Lord Raglan.
Balaclava: A knitted woollen cap covering the head and neck, with an opening for the face, named after the Battle of Balaclava during the Crimean War at which the charge of the Light Brigade took place.
Their’s not to reason why
Their’s but to do and die
When can their glory fade? — the last stanza opens.
It’s a favourite poem for recitation in schools. Joe threw his hands right and left and declaimed with schoolboy gusto
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
…
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Devika said she could not imitate the ardour of Joe reciting the poem. It was her father’s favourite poem said Arundhaty. Devika said the commander did not want the men to ride into the ambush, but to go and check out the place (see above). By a succession of transmittals, in the end, only the ‘Advance rapidly!’ part was heard.
Pamela’s students who employed this poem in competitions always walked away with a prize. Joe said Kumkum will oft admonish him to not use his brain when he goes to the market, but simply adhere to the list given, but invariably he ends up using his brain, and gets reprimanded for showing initiative. This poem is a perfect illustration. The commander leading the charge could see the guns to the front, to the right, to the left; if he had even half a brain (that he had not left behind), would he have thundered on suicidally with 675 men into the ‘Valley of Death’? The women uniformly agreed that as far as soldiers are concerned
Their’s not to reason why
Their’s but to do and die
but for Joe leaving your brain behind is fatal to even the most resolute exercise in valour. As General George Patton, World War II commander of the US Seventh Army, and later of the Third Army, said:
The object of war is not to die for your country but to make the other bastard die for his.
Pamela said this poem has been recited for fun in various accents, including the American accent, and the Sardarji accent and offered to mimic that recitation. KumKum thought of having a Zoom meeting with no agenda, just to chat among KRG friends.
Pamela
Pamela
Biography of Maya Angelou (1928 – 2014)
She was an American poet who wrote powerfully about women’s struggles and black rights. She wrote a succession of autobiographies laying bare her life beginning with Why the Caged Bird Sings (1969).
She pursued many careers from cook to prostitute, as a dancer and performer, and later worked as a journalist for civil rights. From being an actress she became a writer and director of plays and later took on an academic role at a university. She was a regular on the public lecture circuit in the decades of the sixties to the eighties.She is remembered for reciting the poem On the Pulse of Morning at the first inauguration of Bill Clinton as President in 1993.
She had a calamitous early life when her parents’ marriage fell apart and she went to live with her grandmother. She experienced sex abuse as a child from her mother’s boyfriend. One of her teachers introduced her to literature and got her reading the great authors, and women authors in particular. She became a teen-age mother at age 17.
She married in 1951 inter-racially and took up dance classes in San Francisco and performed with Alvin Ailey. Her marriage was over in 1954, but she continued dancing professionally under a new name she assumed, Maya Angelou (she was Marguerite Johnson up to this point). She toured Europe in 1954-55 with a production of Porgy and Bess, the musical, and became an expert calypso dancer, and even composed and sang her own tunes.
Maya Angelou in 1969, the year of her landmark memoir. Photo by Chester Higgins, Jr.
In 1959 she moved to New York and with some encouragement took up writing, and met members of the Harlem Writers Guild. After meeting Martin Luther King she became a dedicated fundraiser for his cause and organised performances for the anti-apartheid movement also.
1961 to 1969 was a time when she moved to Ghana and lived with a South African freedom fighter, Vusumzi Make. She also performed in plays. She occupied positions in the University of Accra, Ghana, and revived the theatre there. It was there she became friends with the revolutionary black leader, Malcolm X and also with James Baldwin. She was called on to participate in a march for civil rights by MLK, but he was assassinated, as was Malcolm X. Both events cast her into despondence.
She continued acting and composing and writing for other singers. Her output of articles, short stories and TV scripts was large. She was offered a professorship at Wake Forest University in North Carolina, in spite of having no college degree herself. She subsequently toured and gave lectures and in 1995 delivered a poem titled A Brave and Startling Truth, for the 50th anniversary of the United Nations. She supported Democratic candidates for office.
Maya Angelou died in 2014 at age 86, having written four books in the last decade of her life. She published besides her seven autobiographies, several books of poetry and three books of essays. She has a vast list of TV scripts and movies spanning fifty years. She received more than 50 honorary degrees.
Commentary
Maya Angelou’s ends her poem for the 75th anniversary of the United Nations
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.
That is when, and only when
We come to it.
The poet dreams of a world where
… every man and every woman
Can live freely …
Without crippling fear
Can live freely …
Without crippling fear
Seventy-five years later, we may not have had a World War, but an endless succession of regional wars has plagued the globe. And yet the threat of nuclear catastrophe looms, not from Iran or N Korea or any of the smaller nation states, but from the the five powers with permanent seats at the UN Security Council. They are the countries with primary responsibility, under the UN Charter, for the maintenance of international peace and security.
This carpet, a gift from Iran, adorns a wall of the UN Headquarters:
Sewn in gold thread concentrically is a famous poem of Sa'di of Shiraz, the 13th century poet of Iran. In a verse translation it reads:
Human beings are members of a whole
In creation of one essence and soul.
If one member is afflicted with pain
Other members uneasy will remain.
If you’ve no sympathy for human pain
The name of human you cannot retain!
KumKum
KumKum
Biography of Adrienne Rich (1929 – 2012)
Adrienne Rich was born in Baltimore, Maryland, and died at age 82 in Santa Cruz, California. She was the elder of two sisters. Her father Arnold Rich was a renowned pathologist at The Johns Hopkins Medical School. Her mother, Helen Rich was a Concert Pianist and a Composer. Adrienne grew up in a family which appreciated music and Literature. Her father enjoyed poetry of all great poets and collected their books in his library. Both the parents spent time to give their two daughters a good grounding in liberal education.
Adrienne graduated from Radcliffe College, the women’s college of Harvard University at the time. She learned, among other subjects, the craft of writing. Her first book of poems, A Change of World, was published before her graduation. It was well received by the lovers of poetry.
In 1953, she married Alfred H. Conrad, Professor of Economics at Harvard University. They settled in Cambridge, Massachusetts, close to Harvard University, and had three sons. She continued to compose poetry and write essays, publishing several books of poems while taking care of her young family. Later, her husband took up a job to teach at the City College, New York, and the family moved to New York. Adrienne blossomed in New York. She taught in various colleges there and also became an activist. She was against the Vietnam war; she fought for Women's Rights and LGBTQ Rights and refused to pay her Taxes to the Government that she thought was working against its people.
Adrienne Rich – Photo by Eamonn McCabe
A few years after her husband's death in 1970, Adrienne met Jamaica born novelist Michelle Cliff. In 1976 the two became partners. This relationship lasted until her death. Adrienne and Cliff moved to Santa Cruz, California, at some point. There too, she had no problem in getting teaching assignments in Colleges and Universities. She continued her activism, wrote many essays and published several non-fiction books. Poetry always found its way into her active life. She published 23 books of poetry and about a dozen non-fiction books, which contain her ideas and thoughts on various activist projects she supported.
Adrienne Rich was a very talented, liberated, modern woman, who lived a long and a committed life.
Commentary
More than a poet Adrienne Rich is an activist.
For some reason a gratuitous reference was made to our homegrown, activist-novelist, Arundhati Roy (AR). Her first novel was not marred or diffused by the sharp voice of an activist. But her second novel, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness (TMUH), contains stories from the 2002 Godhra train burning, the insurgency in Kashmir, and Maoist uprisings. KumKum says these concerns of Arundhati Roy, valid as they might be in the realm of politics, take on a strident tone which detracts from the literary value of TMUH, in her opinion. The novel has stories of several people connected with these political events in India. As the New York Times reviewer put it, the novel is a “a panoramic mosaic of modern India, and the countless social, political, religious and cultural issues roiling just below the surface of everyday life.” But the reviewer states that if a reader is willing to wade through some laboured passages, there lies at the end a “musical and beautifully orchestrated conclusion.”
Geeta asked KumKum what she meant by ‘literary value.’ AR is primarily an activist, said KumKum. It is full of her ideas against the GOI, etc. The politics takes over. AR has great skills as a writer and her mastery over words can weave magic. Some say TMUH was not a novel, but that is not true; it is a novel and tells one or more stories of people in contemporary India. She is more driven by her rage against the GOI now, thought Priya. In answer to the question on literary value, KumKum said literary value is constituted by such elements as character development, writing skill, and what takes you beyond and above the mundane, to an imagined place made vivid by the author’s ability make the unreal real.
To expand on the question raised by Geeta here is a succinct answer. Another set of considerations that confer literary value on texts is presented at some length here. Admittedly it is a subjective judgment, but such a judgment is nevertheless made by prize award committees, critics and reviewers in well-known journals in different parts of the world, and by knowledgeable readers. Mere popular acclaim does not confer literary value.
Thommo
Maggie Smith
Biography of Maggie Smith (born 1977)
Maggie Smith is the author of Keep Moving , Good Bones , The Well Speaks of Its Own Poison, Lamp of the Body, and three prizewinning chapbooks. She is also the recipient of fellowships from the National Endowment for the Arts, the Ohio Arts Council, and the Sustainable Arts Foundation. Smith is today a freelance writer and editor.
Smith was born in Columbus, Ohio, in 1977. She received her Bachelor of Arts from Ohio Wesleyan University in 1999, and then went on to receive her Master of Fine Arts from The Ohio State University in 2003
From 2003 to 2004, Smith served as the Emerging Writer Lecturer for Gettysburg College. She went on to take a position as an assistant editor with a children's trade book publisher. She worked there for two years and became an associate editor. Eventually, she decided to make the switch to freelance work.
As a poet, she has been published widely, individual poems appearing in The Paris Review, The Gettysburg Review, The Iowa Review, The Southern Review, Virginia Quarterly Review, Shenandoah, and other journals.
Her work has also been widely anthologised in From the Other World: Poems in Memory of James Wright; The Year’s Best Fantasy & Horror 2008; Apocalypse Now: Poems and Prose from the End of Days, and The Helen Burns Anthology: New Voices from the Academy of American Poets University & College Prizes.
She lives in Bexley, a small town in Ohio, USA
Thommo
Smith’s poem Good Bones, was originally published in the journal Waxwing in June 2016, and has been widely circulated on social media and read by an estimated one million people. A Wall Street Journal story in May 2020 described it as ‘keeping the realities of life's ugliness from young innocents,’ citing that the poem had gone viral after catastrophes such as the 2016 Orlando nightclub shooting, the May 2017 suicide bombing at a concert in Manchester, U.K., the 2017 mass shooting in Las Vegas, and the coronavirus pandemic. It ends on a hopeful note using the language of a property agent:
… Any decent realtor,
walking you through a real shithole, chirps on
about good bones: This place could be beautiful,
right? You could make this place beautiful.
It is impossible to know how many people have read Good Bones – estimates are over one million. The poem has been interpreted by a dance troupe in India, turned into a musical score for the voice and harp, and been translated into Spanish, Italian, French, Korean, Hindi, Tamil, Telugu and Malayalam.
Commentary
While searching for poems to recite in troubled times Thommo came across Good Bones by Maggie Smith, but it had already been recited. He therefore chose two other poems by the poet. Her poems have appeared in a number of magazines. He read How Dark the Beginning, a gem of a poem which ends on this note
We talk so much of light, please
let me speak on behalf
of the good dark. Let us
talk more of how dark
the beginning of a day is
The poet recalls the dark glow of the morning with
the sun cresting
like a wave that won’t break
over us
The sun cresting like a wave, that won’t break, is a wonderful image for crepuscular light, remarked Joe. Everyone had a smile on their face at this point.
By a quirk of lighting and some luck in timing, this still image of Priya’s face illustrates the very line in the poem
Thommo gave a strong reading of her poem What I carried. It has repeated lines,
I carried my fear of the world
The fear takes many different forms. What it teaches the poet and how she is proved right by continuing to carry the fear, even when it bites back, forms a very tightly woven poem. You can marvel at the concluding stanza
I carried my fear of the world
to my children and laid it down
at their feet, a kill, a gift.
Or I was laid at their feet.
KumKum cried ‘Lovely, lovely! , I love her poems.’ Priya said in this poem and the previous one Maggie Smith embraces two things people are wary of: darkness and fear, making them a part of her life.
In a later exchange with Thommo, Joe said What I carried is a mysterious poem, and pointed to a twitter comment by the poet:
Think of yourself as a nesting doll: how many versions of yourself have you carried this far, to this point? How many more iterations will there be as you age? Know there is room for all of you. Keep moving.
Thommo liked the connection with Matryoshka dolls. One more recollection was triggered when Joe remembered the film Il Postino and the interaction between a simple postman and Pablo Neruda, the poet. Over various letter delivery visits and casual conversations the postman picks up the poetic wisdom of Neruda. At one point when Neruda recites something, the postman cries out ‘Anaphora! Anaphora! …’ having just discovered the name for the use of a repeating first line in poems. So too, here we can see the use of anaphora in the repetition of the line What I carried.
Shoba
Shoba
Biography of Mary Oliver (1935 – 2019)
As a poet she was rooted in nature and wrote about all the life in it that moved her. She was born in Cleveland, Ohio. It was a childhood fancy of hers to build huts of sticks and branches in the nearby woods. She went to Ohio State University and the elite Vassar College for women, but did not take a degree from either. The poet Edna St. Vincent Millay had a deep influence on her. Though shy to talk about her private life she acquired her lesbian partner, Molly Malone Cook, at this stage. They moved to Massachusetts. Her work was received well by critics and in 1983, her fifth book of poems, American Primitive won the Pulitzer Prize. The New York Times book critic Bruce Bennet said American Primitive, “insists on the primacy of the physical,” and commended Oliver’s “distinctive voice and vision.”
She left these instructions for living a nature poet’s life:
– Pay attention
– Be astonished
– Tell about it
Poems of empathy, delight, and awe are her hallmark. For instance, these two lines from her poem Swan:
an armful of white blossoms,
a perfect commotion of silk and linen …
Dream Work (1986) continues her indefatigable exploration of nature with an ecstasy, that is not blind to the cruelty of living things being preyed upon. Her volume New and Selected Poems (1992), won the National Book Award. Here are three short lines:
When it’s over, I want to say: all my life
I was a bride married to amazement.
I was the bridegroom, taking the world into my arms.
Mary Oliver – photo by Mariana Cook
She has been compared to other women poets of the modernist era like the great Elizabeth Bishop and her mentor Marianne Moore. She continued to publish verse in the nineties and early 2000’s, one volume every few years. She is also a fine teacher, instructing at workshops for literature and poetry and leading people to appreciate the underlying craft.
A Poetry Handbook (1994) is a document that shows her devotion to the learnable side of her avocation. As she puts it, “It is craft, after all, that carries an individual's ideas to the far edge of familiar territory.” She argues that the content of a poem cannot be separated from “the poem's fluid and breathing body.” And a poem must rise above the daily ordinariness of writing to be more than the work of an amateur.
Mary Oliver was the Catharine Osgood Foster professor for Distinguished Teaching at Bennington College, Vermont until 2001. Besides the Pulitzer and National Book Award she has also won the American Academy of Arts & Letters Award, the Poetry Society of America’s Shelley Memorial Prize and Alice Fay di Castagnola Award. She was 83 when she died in 2019, leaving behind over 35 books of her poems, and books of essays and two on the craft of poetry.
Commentary
Coincidentally Mary Oliver, the poet Shoba took up, was from the same state, Ohio, as Maggie Smith, the poet of Thommo. Mary Oliver is a poet of nature. Shoba was looking for nature poems and she loved it when she read Mary Oliver. Shoba did not know she is quite famous. She died last year.
She used to hide pencils in trees along her nature walk so that she could jot things down. Her intricate observation of a grasshopper which even feeds on sugar out of the poet’s hand before flying off, gives rise to a speculation about prayer; she knows
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
KumKum liked this poem of the grasshopper, especially for its description of the jaw movement of the grasshopper masticating, back and forth.
After Shoba had traipsed through the second poem KumKum exclaimed she loved Mary Oliver’s poems and had picked up a book of poems, selected by her, titled Devotions. Here’s a little poem from that collection, titled The Gift:
Be still, my soul, and steadfast.
Earth and heaven both are still watching
though time is draining from the clock
and your walk, that was confident and quick,
has become slow.
So, be slow if you must, but let
the heart still play its true part.
Love still as once you loved, deeply
and without patience. Let God and the world
know you are grateful.
That the gift has been given.
Joe has the book of hers on the craft of poetry mentioned above, which he bought long ago. In an exchange after the session Joe wondered if Shoba had seen the beginning of the poem The Summer Day, as an analogue of the Book of Job, Ch 41, in the Bible where God’s power is shown in creatures, and he inquires of Job about Leviathan (the whale):
“Can you draw out Leviathan with a fishhook?
Or press down his tongue with a cord?
“Can you put a rope in his nose
Or pierce his jaw with a hook?
“Will he make many supplications to you,
Or will he speak to you soft words?
Indeed, said Shoba she had thought of the same thing, but imagined it might be too long a discursion, and one does not expect everyone to be familiar with the Book of Job, in spite of Tennyson praising it for its literary and poetic qualities. Here it is, the Book of Job in a standard online edition for those who want to plunge in.
Geeta
Geeta
Biography of Christina Rossetti (1830 – 1894)
She was the daughter of the poet Gabriele Rossetti. Her three siblings also became writers: Dante Gabriel – a poet-artist, the other two, Michael and Maria, writers. She was home-schooled by her parents, and grew up with a classical education steeped in Dante, and romantic poets like Keats.
When her father grew sick, her mother took up teaching to keep the family from poverty. She had depression in her youth and later became devoted to religion. In spite of suitors in succession from the age of twenty, none clicked. She was the model for several paintings by her brother, Dante Gabriel.
Christina began writing poems as a girl aged twelve, in various forms: hymns, ballads, and even sonnets. Her first published poems (on death) date from the age of eighteen. Her best collection appeared at age 31, Goblin Market and Other Poems. It’s about desire and salvation as experienced by a woman. Christina worked in a charitable house for women. Typical of her verse is the first stanza of this poem:
A Better Resurrection
I have no wit, no words, no tears;
My heart within me like a stone
Is numbed too much for hopes or fears.
Look right, look left, I dwell alone;
I lift mine eyes, but dimmed with grief
No everlasting hills I see;
My life is in the falling leaf:
O Jesus, quicken me.
Sadness, a religious cry, a reflection on being alone.
Christina Rossetti – painting by her brother Dante Gabriel Rossetti
Later in life Christina was wracked by an auto-immune disorder in 1872, suffering a near fatal attack. Then she got cancer in 1893 and died a year later.
Her popularity faded but with the rise of psychiatry people began exploring Freudian themes in her poetry, such as religious and sexual repression. She had mastered several poetic forms and used them to advantage. She influenced later writers like Virginia Woolf, Gerard Manley Hopkins, and even Philip Larkin.
One of her famous poems In the Bleak Midwinter, is recited at Christmas. Other poems too have been arranged to be sung, and set to music. She has left behind six books of poetry, two novels, and several writings and commentaries on religious subjects.
Commentary
Geeta read a poem by Christian Rossetti called Up-Hill. This poem is about life. The poem reminded Priya of Emily Dickinson. KumKum had in mind a camping trip where you have to climb up the hill until you reach the campground; the poem also reminds her of death and whether as Jesus said there is enough room in his Father’s house (John 14:2 – In my Father's house are many mansions: if it were not so, I would have told you. I go to prepare a place for you.) Joe said there may be a place beyond, but you have to know, where? Will the place be hot, or salubrious and air-conditioned. Will we get a drink over there (Priya). Will you get mangoes (KumKum)? Will you be hungry or thirsty?
Who wants to go to heaven, Devika’s father used to say; if you compare between heaven and hell, who wants to go to heaven? It will be such a boring place, you have get up early in the morning, have a bath, and say your prayers (he was a religious person, mind you). ‘I want to go to hell where I can sleep as long as I want.’ And though a pure vegetarian he’d say, ‘I want to go to hell where I can eat peacock brains and nightingale heart and other exotic food.’ Although he died 35 years ago, this conversation springs fresh to Devika’s mind whenever anyone talks of going to heaven. For Malayalees the lack of biryani in the next world would be off-putting. Geeta’s grandfather wanted to avoid heaven unless guns were allowed, for he was a shikari.
Priya
Priya
Biography of James Arthur Baldwin (1924 – 1987)
James Baldwin was an American essayist, novelist, and playwright whose eloquence and passion on the subject of race in America made him an important voice, particularly in the late 1950s and early 1960s, in the United States and, later, through much of Europe and Africa.
Early life
The eldest of nine children, he grew up in poverty in the black ghetto of Harlem in New York City. From age 14 to 16 he was active after school hours as a preacher in a small revivalist church; it was a period he wrote about in his semi-autobiographical first and finest novel, Go Tell It on the Mountain (1953), and in his play about a woman evangelist, The Amen Corner (performed in New York City, 1965).
After graduation from high school, he began a restless period of ill-paid jobs, self-study, and literary apprenticeship in Greenwich Village, the bohemian quarter of New York City. He left in 1948 for Paris, where he lived for the next eight years. Later, from 1969 he became a self-styled “transatlantic commuter,” living alternatively in the south of France and in New York and New England. His second novel, Giovanni’s Room (1956), deals with the white world and concerns an American in Paris torn between his love for a man and his love for a woman. Between the two novels came a collection of essays, Notes of a Native Son (1955).
In 1957 he returned to the United States and became an active participant in the civil rights struggle that swept the nation. His book of essays, Nobody Knows My Name (1961), explores black-white relations in the United States. This theme also was central to his novel Another Country (1962), which examines sexual as well as racial issues.
James Baldwin, New York City, 1976 – photo by Nancy Crampton
The New Yorker magazine gave over almost all of its November 17, 1962, issue to a long article by Baldwin on the Black Muslim separatist movement and other aspects of the civil rights struggle. The article became a best seller in book form as The Fire Next Time (1963). His bitter play about racist oppression, Blues for Mister Charlie (‘Mister Charlie’ being a black term for a white man), played on Broadway to mixed reviews in 1964.
Baldwin continued to write until his death—publishing works including Going to Meet the Man (1965), a collection of short stories; the novels Tell Me How Long the Train’s Been Gone (1968), If Beale Street Could Talk (1974), and Just Above My Head (1979); and The Price of the Ticket (1985), a collection of autobiographical writings. None of his later works achieved the popular and critical success of his early work.
Social and Political activism
Baldwin was on the cover of Time magazine in 1963 while he was touring the South speaking about the restive Civil Rights Movement. Around the time of publication of The Fire Next Time, Baldwin became a well-known spokesperson for civil rights and a celebrity noted for championing the cause of Black Americans. He frequently appeared on television and delivered speeches on college campuses. He talked about the uneasy relationship between Christianity and the burgeoning Black Muslim movement. After publication, several Black nationalists criticised Baldwin for his conciliatory attitude. They questioned whether his message of love and understanding would do much to change race relations in America. The book was lapped up by white people looking for answers to the question: what do Black Americans really want?
Literary and political network
Baldwin was a close friend of the singer, pianist, and civil rights activist Nina Simone. With Langston Hughes and Lorraine Hansberry, Baldwin helped awaken Simone to the Civil Rights Movement. Baldwin and Hansberry met with Robert F. Kennedy, along with Kenneth Clark and Lena Horne and others in an attempt to persuade Kennedy of the importance of civil rights legislation.
Baldwin influenced the work of French painter Philippe Derome, whom he met in Paris in the early 1960s. Baldwin also knew a host of famous people like Marlon Brando, Charlton Heston, Billy Dee Williams, Huey P. Newton, Nikki Giovanni, Jean-Paul Sartre, Jean Genet (with whom he campaigned on behalf of the Black Panther Party), Lee Strasberg, Elia Kazan, Rip Torn, Alex Haley, Miles Davis, Amiri Baraka, Martin Luther King, Jr., Dorothea Tanning, Leonor Fini, Margaret Mead, Josephine Baker, Allen Ginsberg, Chinua Achebe and Maya Angelou. He wrote at length about his ‘political relationship’ with Malcolm X. He collaborated with his childhood friend and photographer Richard Avedon on the 1964 book Nothing Personal. In image and text, Avedon and Baldwin examined the formation of identity, and the bonds that both underlie and undermine human connection.
Maya Angelou called Baldwin her ‘friend and brother,’ and credited him for setting the stage for her 1969 autobiography I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings. Baldwin was made a Commandeur de la Légion d'Honneur by the French government in 1986.
Baldwin was also a close friend of Nobel Prize-winning novelist Toni Morrison. Upon his death, Morrison wrote a eulogy for Baldwin that appeared in The New York Times. In the eulogy, titled Life in His Language, Morrison credits Baldwin with being her literary inspiration and the person who showed her the true potential of writing.
Commentary
James Baldwin was Priya’s poet of choice, because of the recent Juneteenth celebration. The most significant action against slavery was the Civil War and Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation in the midst of the Civil War, on September 22, 1862, declaring that all slaves in the rebellious states would be free. But, somehow the declaration three years later on June 19, 1865 in Galveston, Texas, by an obscure army general whom nobody remembers, name of Gordon Granger, that all slaves in Texas were free, is being recalled today as though it were more significant than Abraham Lincoln’s Emancipation Proclamation! This is a false narrative in Joe’s opinion.
Juneteenth is taking on new life with the Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement and worldwide protests after the police killing of George Floyd.
Baldwin was a famous essayist and, wrote essays as big as books. During the sixties when Civil Rights was being fought, he came to the fore. He had a hard childhood. When he was nineteen he discovered he was bisexual. He got into a brawl in a restaurant after throwing a glass of water at someone when he was discriminated against. He saw he was not going to be accepted in contemporary American society and like many other black artists before him he emigrated to Paris. He lived his life there, coming back to the US from time to time to participate in the Civil Rights movement.
He wrote Giovanni’s Room, a novel about seeing the white world through a black man’s eyes. He struggled to create his identity as a writer. As he said in 1987, “It comes as a great shock to discover the country which is your birthplace, and to which you owe your life and your identity, has not in its whole system of reality evolved any place for you.”
He became a poet toward the end of his life. His poems are very mature. Priya chose to read the third part of a long poem, Stagger Lee wonders. Stagger Lee (SL), a folklore character, is a stereotypical black guy, who dresses flashily, is prone to violence, and is loud-mouthed. The story behind Stagger Lee is on wikipedia. SL was a pimp. He had a fight with a guy named Billy Lyons which ended with a shooting death for which SL was convicted and imprisoned.
The poem is about a conversation between a white guy and the black guy; the quoted exchanges are set in italics. The poem doesn’t use the word black or white but Baldwin does use the word nigger to stand for a conception that the white man has invented to stand for what he turned the oppressed enslaved person of black colour into. Baldwin often said he did not think of himself as a black or a nigger, simply as a human, who is not treated as a human in America.
Baldwin uses the word nigger, which he defines as the “long suffering character, imagined, invented, and marched to the conveyor belt of the Republic, in order that they [those who identify as white] might hold on for as long as possible to the very last white country the world will ever see.”
The poem has four parts. The first part deals with what white people think of black people; he calls the whites pink and alabaster pragmatists. The second part deals with how niggers can help themselves. The third part is whites wondering how black people have survived.
Well. Niggers don't own nothing,
got no flag, even our names
are hand-me-downs
and you don't change that
by calling yourself X:
…
I've seen some stars.
I got some stripes.
Zakia said people have taken the blacks for granted, existing in the background, but undeserving of any of the benefits of America. Zakia referred to an article in The Hindu a few days back in which Barack Obama and others are said to have let down blacks because they were ‘goodwill hunters’, much too accommodating of the peace and order the whites wanted; nothing should rock the boat. BLM is important, but to what extent will the role of policing change, because it’s too aggressive now. Even in India in the lockdown the police use the lathi.
Geeta said their mentality has to change, and changing laws won’t accomplish that. One reason the police acts the way they do is because they act to please their political masters, said Arundhaty. Priya made fun of the Kerala police who are taking birthday cakes to celebrate the birthdays of housebound Covid-19 people; they should be policing to enforce law and order instead she said. Gopa said the police think a lockdown is a curfew and you can beat up people with lathis who violate the curfew; no, it is public health lockdown. But some police act with restraint. Arundhaty said in TN a policeman was asking the people not to come out, and explaining they should stay at home for their own safety; he was reduced to tears because none would listen.
Joe said policing depends on the Government earning the trust of the people, by working for the public good, from the poor people on up, for all of society. His own experience of Kerala police who are charged with enforcing social distancing and dispersing crowds if they happen, has been good; they come politely and explain it is for your own good not to be out and about when it’s not for essential work. This government in Kerala has earned his trust because of the Minster of Health, K.K. Shailaja, who is busy doing her work without hogging the public limelight, having health workers down to the taluk level doing contact tracing, enforcing quarantine by checking on the detainees three times a day, once by physical visiting, and twice by phone. The GOK is doing a jolly good job. The results are there for the world to see:
Kerala Government Covid-19 Dashboard Summary as on June 30
Priya said laughing we need to talk about Covid-rani and Nipah-rajkumar later, but it is clear that one and the same competent person has been in charge of Kerala’s health protection throughout, K.K. Shailaja.
You can read about Baldwin’s journey as a poet in the review of his poems by Agendy Bonifacio. Maya Angelou spoke about their lifelong friendship at his obsequies, after he died of throat cancer in Vence in Provence, France. Hundreds of mourners attended the event in the Cathedral of St. John Divine in Manhattan as the poet Amiri Baraka nominated Baldwin as ‘God’s black revolutionary mouth.’
Zakia
Amy Lowell – TIME Magazine cover from March 2, 1925
Biography of Amy Lawrence Lowell (1874 – 1925)
Amy Lowell was an American poet of the imagist school from Brookline, Massachusetts. During her career she wrote and published nearly 650 poems. She died in 1925 and was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1926.
She was born in 1874 into the prominent New England family of Lowells. One recalls the well-known after-dinner toast making fun of the Boston Brahmins:
Here’s to dear old Boston,
The home of the bean and the cod,
Where Lowells speak only to Cabots,
And Cabots speak only to God.
Amy Lowell was a flamboyant woman whose behaviour belied her upbringing; she flouted convention with her unabashedly public persona. “Poet, propagandist, lecturer, translator, biographer, critic … her verve is almost as remarkable as her verse,” opined the poet and critic Louis Untermeyer. Her most provocative habit was smoking cigars (they lasted longer than cigarettes, she said).
Patterns became one of the most popular poems in Lowell’s literary opus. Filled with rich and vivid imagery, the poem tells the story of a woman who yearns for the love of her late fiancé, who has tragically been killed in the war. At the end of the poem, she is questioning destiny, since her man is dead:
Fighting with the Duke in Flanders,
In a pattern called a war.
Christ! What are patterns for?
If the patterns are meant to torture her, why are such patterns created? The entire futility of that war is being highlighted. Countries may have earned name and fame by fighting wars, but wars result in cruel loss for the families bereaved. In this sense, the poem condemns war and its aftermath.
As we come to the concluding part of the poem, the image of the drooping flower and dripping water suggest pathos. She has lost the beautiful flower of her life and like dripping water its sorrow continues to haunt her memory.
The daffodils and squills
Flutter in the breeze
As they please.
The daffodils and squills
Flutter in the breeze
As they please.
Her dream of starting a new pattern of life with the lover is destroyed by the chaotic pattern of war, which has destroyed all the beautiful patterns of the speaker’s life.
Commentary
In the poem Amy Lowell is questioning the ‘patterns’ of life and why there are patterns when they cannot be followed, and they have to be changed because her fiancé has been killed in the war. She is all dressed up in her brocade gown and is walking up and down the path in her garden, lamenting her fiancé. Zakia liked Amy Lowell because she uses the language of common speech and her imagery is very powerful in depicting the loss the woman suffered. The poem acts at a deeper level. Amy Lowell is easy enough to read, and the understanding comes with a little thought.
Amy Lowell was a lesbian and lived with actor Ada Dwyer Russell who edited her poems; the collection was posthumously awarded the Pulitzer prize. Russell is thought to be the subject of several romantic poems written by Lowell. She grew up in a proper Boston family (the Lowells are counted among the ‘Boston Brahmins’), but she had her flamboyant ways.
The squill flower figures in Amy Lowell’s poem ‘Patterns’
Joe
Joe
Biography of Oliver St. John Gogarty (1878 – 1957)
Gogarty in his long life played many parts. His family had doctors for three generations and he too trained to be a doctor after going to the same Jesuit school (Conglowes) where James Joyce studied. At school he was a good sportsman and a popular, witty, extroverted student.
He finished his medicine at Trinity College, Dublin, in 1907 becoming an ENT surgeon (and later took out the tonsils of W.B. Yeats). If you are a wit, medicine gives you the ultimate education to be uninhibited about the organs and human behaviour. Gogarty excelled as writer of limericks; he could quote reams of Virgil, Homer and Catullus. He was a college champion in swimming and cycling too.
It was during his medical days he associated with James Joyce; this led to their staying together in a place called Martelo Tower which Gogarty had rented. They had a good time but the high jinks of Gogarty unsettled Joyce who had gone there for peace and quiet. One night the third resident, another medical student, brandished a revolver and shot it off in the dark; this so disturbed Joyce, he walked straight out. This is of interest because Joyce made Gogarty immortal by including him in the very first chapter (‘Telemachus’) of the world’s most famous novel, Ulysses, under the name Buck Mulligan.
Oliver St. John Gogarty, 1911 – painting by Orpen William
Gogarty pursued medicine but was also a writer of light verse throughout his life. A dozen books of poems carry his name. One of them An Offering of Swans earned him a prize. In 1922 Gogarty, along with W. B. Yeats, became a member of the Irish Free State Senate after the devolution of power by Britain. Gogarty was a founder of the Sinn Fein nationalist movement. But trouble brewed for him in Ireland with the extreme Irish Nationalists, and he was captured, but escaped by jumping into the Liffey River and swimming across. He eventually moved his practice to Grosvenor Square in London but attended the Senate in Dublin.
Through some partiality of W.B. Yeats with whom he had a long and sympathetic association both in verse and politics, Gogarty came to be included with 17 poems in the The Oxford Book of Modern verse (1892 – 1935) chosen by W.B. Yeats. Yeats praised his lyricism, but today he is considered a minor poet of the Irish Renaissance. He also wrote plays and prose, and autobiographical pieces such as As I Was Going Down Sackville Street. It is full of yarns as only the Irish can tell them, and has plenty of limericks, libellous insults (he was taken to court for one), and interesting sidelights on Dublin society. Here’s a limerick he wrote about Joyce:
(kips = brothels).
There is a young man named Joyce,
Who possesses a sweet tenor voice.
He goes down to the kips
With a psalm on his lips,
And biddeth the harlots rejoice.
When WWII came he wanted to enlist in the airforce for he could fly, but was too old. He departed for a lecture tour of America leaving his wife to look after the house in Renvyle, Connemara, which he loved. Later he acquired citizenship in America, but not desiring to undergo the rigours of taking exams to re-qualify in New York state as a physician at his senior age, he devoted himself entirely to writing. He was fortunate in having a biographer (Ulick O’Connor) who has left a a biography worth reading concerning a man of so many parts, titled A Character and Poet; The Times I've Seen: Oliver St. John Gogarty.
Commentary
In the first poem, The Image Maker, Gogarty is writing about a sculptor at work. He’s clearly referring to an image of Buddha being 'released’ from the jade stone. When sculptors like Michelangelo visited a stone quarry and saw a piece of marble they fancied, it was not the marble stone they saw, but the statue, hidden inside, which their art would reveal:
Beauty his transient eyes descried
In the second poem, Palinode, (meaning a retraction of what has been said earlier) the poet is speaking of one’s slow descent as age advances. Time needs no help from humans to perform its rot, so why cooperate with it?
And surely I shall grow
Incapable of rhyme,
Sans Love and Song, and so
An echo of a mime.
What a desolate expression for being rendered null: An echo of a mime. Gogarty writes his own epitaph, sort of.
Priya at the end said: you recited so well, Joe; fantastic, so nice.
Geetha
George Gordon Noel Byron, 6th Baron Byron by Richard Westall
© National Portrait Gallery, London
Biography of George Gordon Lord Byron (1788 – 1824)
George Gordon Byron, was a British poet, a leading figure in the Romantic movement. Among Byron's best-known works are the brief poems She Walks in Beauty, When We Two Parted, and So We'll Go No More a Roving, in addition to the narrative poems Childe Harold's Pilgrimage and Don Juan. He is regarded as one of the greatest British poets and remains widely read and influential.
Byron was celebrated in life for aristocratic excesses including huge debts, numerous love affairs, rumours of a scandalous incestuous liaison with his half-sister, followed by self-imposed exile. He was famously described by Lady Caroline Lamb as “mad, bad and dangerous to know.” It has been speculated that he suffered from bipolar I disorder, or manic depression. He travelled to fight against the Ottoman Empire in the Greek War of Independence, for which Greeks revere him as a national hero. He died at 36 from a fever contracted while in Missolonghi, Greece.
Commentary
Byron was a friend of Shelley, and also of Leigh Hunt who was mentioned in last year’s Romantic Poets session on Aug 27, 2029. Joe even read a poem by Leigh Hunt who had taken part in a friendly competition with John Keats to write a poem on the Grasshopper and the Cricket in fifteen minutes.
In the painting by Louis Fournier of Shelley’s cremation on the beach on the beach you can see Byron, somewhat effeminate looking, the third figure to the right in front, said Geetha.
The Funeral of Shelley – painting by Louis Edouard Fournier in 1889
(click to enlarge)
He died at the youthful age of 36, somewhat older than Keats or Shelley when they died. The painting may not be accurate in showing Byron as present; overcome by the experience, Byron, as the flames took hold, stripped off and swam out to sea, thus causing him to miss most of it; certainly Mary Shelley was not present although she is shown kneeling. Leigh Hunt stayed in the carriage during the ceremony but is also pictured as the white haired gent in the middle front. All this comes from archival records displayed on a British Library site which have an Account of the death and cremation of P B Shelley recorded in the hand of Edward Trelawny, friend of Byron. He was there and is shown in Fournier’s painting as the first person on the left in front. (see also page 24 of Trelawny’s note, among the images displayed on the British Library site above)
Here is a description by Trelawny of Byron’s reaction: ‘looking at the shapeless, limbless mass as it was dragged from out its sandy grave [Byron] said “What is a human body! Why it might be the rotten carcass of a sheep for all I can distinguish” and further continued, pointing to the black handkerchief, “Look! an old rag retains its form longer than he who wore it. What a humbling and degrading thought that we shall one day resemble this!”
Geetha
Byron had complications in early life (apart from his club-foot) and went to grammar school, and from there at age 13 on to Harrow, spending four years from 1801 to 1805. He was given to excess and even at that early age; ‘the boy is distractedly in love with Miss Chaworth,’ according to a letter by Byron’s mother. He also had relationships with three boys younger than him. At Trinity College in Cambridge he later had a close relationship with John Edleston, which Byron himself later described as ‘a violent, though pure, love and passion.’ We know of other poets who had a homosexual nature, but at that time attitudes were hardening in society against homosexuality.
The poem When coldness Wraps This Suffering Clay resonated with Geetha at this period when she saw her father die. It was a struggle for the family, but even more for her father. It was not a time for singing hymns and so on, but the upsetting thought that her father would take leave; where would his spirit go, and how many days would it take to travel. All these questions were going through her mind. This poem treats the subject of the spirit’s journey after it leaves the body.
There are two concepts
1. The spirit leaving this earthly realm, going past the planets, going into a never-ending space
2. The spirit also being here around the earth at the same time – Geetha always wondered if our loved ones can see us. Some people see their own near and dear people nearby at the time of their own departure, and point to them as if they were present. One aunt saw her daughter who died long ago and said call her in; another aunt saw her mother in the room and said ‘there is Ammachi.’ The idea is that the dead linger on.
And there is a third notion that the spirit goes back to a time before Creation
Before Creation peopled earth,
Its eye shall roll through chaos back
These ideas are so beautifully and succinctly expressed that the poem bears a second (and a third reading) and will yield more of its rasa, although ‘I may have confused you,’ said Geetha; but she loved the poem.
Gopa
Rudyard Kipling
Biography of Rudyard Kipling (1865 – 1936)
Joseph Rudyard Kipling, the English journalist, short story writer, poet and novelist was born less than ten years after the Great Indian Mutiny, in British India (Bombay). Educated in England like many Anglo Indians, he returned to India when he was seventeen. He began his career as the assistant editor of a Lahore newspaper, the Civil and Military Gazette in 1883. India has inspired much of his work. In 1886 he published his first collection of verse, Departmental Ditties and the short story, The Man who would be King (1888)
The majority of Kipling’s unforgettable works were written after he had left India for the second time in 1889. His works of fiction include Indian Tales (1890), The Jungle Book (1894), Kim (1901)and poems Gunga Din (1890), The White Man’s Burden (1899) and If - (1910). In some of his writings and poems, Kipling reiterated his firm belief in the glory of the British Empire. A child of the Empire, he was among its most popular writers. In 1907 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature, the first English language writer to receive the prize and also the youngest, at 41 years.
Moulmein Harbour as viewed from the great Kyaikthanlan Pagoda in Burma, taken in the 1870's by Samuel Bourne (1832-1912) to illustrate the Kipling poem ‘Mandalay’
In 1889 whilst travelling from to England he took the Eastern route, travelling by steamship from Calcutta to Japan. Rangoon was the first port of call with an unplanned stop at Moulmein. He was enchanted by the land of the Burmese, as well as by the dainty almond skinned ladies of Burma. In remembrance, he wrote the pro-colonial classic poem called Mandalay (1890). The poem was published in the first collection Barrack Room Ballads and Other Verses in 1892.
Kipling’s poem Mandalay reproduces the longings of a British soldier looking back on his service in colonial Burma and a pretty Burmese girl he kissed there. Walking around the paved London streets, feeling the “blasted English drizzle”, he bemoans the fact that the cockney housemaids he is left to walk with are coarse and ignorant. He concludes that the “sweetest maid” in the land was the one he met on the road to Mandalay.
Gopa
The poem was much admired by the critics as well as Kipling’s contemporaries for its rhythmic and melodic nature. Written as a ballad, it is convenient to memorise, recite and sing. After it was set to music by Oley Speaks an American composer and song writer in 1907, the poem became famous all over the English speaking world. Here it is set to a traditional tune.
After the two wars of the twentieth century, Kipling’s reputation changed with the change in the political and social climate of the age. Mandalay has been criticized as “an appropriate vehicle for Imperial thought” by a literary critic. George Orwell saw Kipling as a “jingo imperialist”.
In the twenty-first century with the revival of British interest in “the Empire”, critics have disagreed with the view that Kipling was a racist. The political scientist Igor Burnashov in an article for the Kipling Society writes that “the moving love of the Burmese girl and the British soldier is described in a picturesque way. The fact that the Burmese girl represented the inferior, and the British soldier the superior race, is secondary, because Kipling lays stress on human, not imperial relations.”
Kipling was sounded for the British Poet Laureateship and several times for a knighthood, but declined both. Following his death in 1936, his ashes were interred at Poet’s Corner, part of the South Transept of Westminster Abbey.
Commentary
Gopa disliked reading Kipling at the session because there is so much anger in world today against colonialism. If there had been a statue of Kipling anywhere it would have been brought down by now, she said. For one such attempt in 2018 see the article Manchester University students paint over Rudyard Kipling mural. Only one book of his is not tainted by colonialism, and that is The Jungle Book which he wrote in 1894, said Gopa. In all his other novels and stories, Gopa said that Kipling is seen as a rank racist. Take his well-known short story, The Man Who Would Be King; it contains plenty of derogatory statements about the locals. In his work there is nothing good about our people, our culture and so on, said Gopa.
“But there is always, eventually, an awkwardness with Kipling: the race and empire issue.” – quote from Ian Jack in a Guardian article where he says “despite the furore, the poem Mandalay wasn’t an argument for colonialism.”
Gopa first thought of reading the poem If –, but found it had already made its debut in KRG some time back. ‘It is all about nationalism, and that did not sit well with an anti-nationalist like me,’ said Gopa. Strange, thought Joe, for there is not a bit of jingoism or pride of country in it; it is advice about persevering through adversity, and the patience required if a person wants to achieve success in the end.
Then Gopa selected Mandalay. Kipling returned to Britain from India in 1889 by sailing east to America. From Calcutta he went to Rangoon, and took a side-trip south by a steamer to the port of Moulmein. There, on the steps of a temple he was captivated by the beauty of Burmese girls, and later wrote:
“I love the Burman with the blind favouritism born of first impression. When I die I will be a Burman … and I will always walk about with a pretty almond-coloured girl who shall laugh and jest too, as a young maiden ought. She shall not pull a sari over her head when a man looks at her and glare suggestively from behind it, nor shall she tramp behind me when I walk: for these are the customs of India. She shall look all the world between the eyes, in honesty and good fellowship, and I will teach her not to defile her pretty mouth with chopped tobacco in a cabbage leaf, but to inhale good cigarettes of Egypt's best brand.”
Gopa loved the poem and found it beautiful and rhythmic; it has been set to music several times. She has recited it on other occasions. KumKum interjected that she was born in Moulmein. Arundhaty too was born in Burma and has a Burmese birth certificate (hence won’t pass the CAA test on that score). Gopa liked Frank Sinatra singing Mandalay, which Joe (and the Kipling estate) disapproved, for changing the honest word ‘girl’ to the coarse American term ‘broad.’ You can hear the song on Youtube. Gopa said Sinatra’s baritone voice is great for the song; Joe felt otherwise.
Thanks for reading some ‘light poet,’ said, KumKum at the end.
The poem has been set to music. Joe exchanged notes with Gopa later; a poem can be appreciated on many levels, and you have to let go all other things about the poet, if you find the elements you are looking for in the verse and song. In this one poem, and in many others, Kipling undoubtedly has succeeded, not in conveying imperial sentiments, so much as an ordinary soldier’s yearning for a land where he found transitory happiness in the arms of a girl.
Sinatra’s American jazz baritone has nothing to do with the scene depicted, which is far better rendered in this melancholy voice of a common Cockney soldier:
Gopa said Kipling’s Mandalay is a beautiful poem and she would have loved to discuss all the themes in the poem, but there was no time with the boss lady immediately calling on the next reader. Gopa said ‘Mandalay is a lovely poem, ideal for reciting. It transports you straight away to an enchanting land of temples and elephants and the pretty ladies too.’ It was The Jungle Book that started her reading Kipling. She called that ‘one of the classiest and the best books ever written.’
Kavita
Wyatt Townley – photo by Terry Weckbaugh
Biography of Wyatt Townley (born 1954)
Wyatt Townley is Poet Laureate of the state of Kansas. Her books include four collections of poetry: Rewriting the Body, The Breathing Field, Perfectly Normal, and The Afterlives of Trees.
Her work has been published in The Paris Review, Newsweek, and other places.
She is a former dancer, now a yoga teacher, and has written books on both subjects. She founded a therapeutic system called Yoganetics®, practiced in several countries. It is a slow-motion yoga, using the inside-out approach. She is also a dance critic writing for several journals. Her mission is to bring poetry to the people. She received the Master Artist fellowship in poetry from the Kansas Art Commission and was invited to establish the state poet laureate program.
Commentary
The poem Kavita read, Finding the Scarf, is from the collection The Afterlives of Trees. Talking of trees she sees them as silent creatures, the height they achieve depends on the depth of their roots. The trees know how to hold on and how to let go and bend, and how to begin again in season, returning to bloom year after year.
KumKum appreciated that the trees in this poem are brought down by lightning and tornadoes, not by humans felling them. It is nature taking its course. Kavita was attending the session from her flat in Kochi by the Chillavanoor river; next month she will probably join us from the estate.
Saras
Saras
Biography of Stephen Dunn (born 1939)
Stephen Dunn is an American poet and educator. Dunn has written fifteen collections of poetry. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry for his 2001 collection, Different Hours and has received an Academy Award in Literature from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. Among his other awards are three National Endowment for the Arts Creative Writing Fellowships, a Guggenheim Fellowship, and a Rockefeller Foundation Fellowship.
In an interview in the Los Angeles Review of Books, Dunn says that there were no readers in his family. He went to college on a basketball scholarship and later earned an MA in Creative writing from Syracuse University. His accessible work conveys its insights through quiet reflections on everyday events and central human dilemmas.
(https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/one-mask-at-a-time-an-interview-with-stephen-dunn)
Stephen Dunn
Commentary
Stephen Dunn is a contemporary poet and educator; he teaches in Frostburg State University in Maryland. He won the Pulitzer prize for poetry in 2001 for his collection Different Hours. Saras did not find much about him on the Internet. His family was not a reading family and even he did not read in his youth; he went to college on a basketball scholarship and though he played well, he was the shortest in the team at 6 feet 1 inch and found he could not make a career out of the game. After college he took an advertising job for a few years. Then he went back to do post-graduate work and that’s when he discovered writing as his other love.
Stephen Dunn has many interviews on YouTube. These two youtube videos with Stephen Dunn are representative:
Interview with the poet Stephen Dunn
The Mysteries of the Ordinary: A Conversation with Stephen Dunn
Frostburg in Maryland where he makes his home, was on the way to DC from Morgantown, West Virginia, where Joe worked; Frostburg is a bowl amid the surrounding mountains whose topography attracted a lot of snow in winter.
Talitha
Talitha
Biography of Constantine P. Cavafy (1863 – 1933)
Cavafy made his home in the Greek quarter in Alexandria. A brothel was on the lower floor, and there was a church and a hospital nearby. He would sit in his study, staring at a half-finished poem lying on his desk and hear the sound of voices in the street.
He was the last of nine children of well-to-do parents from Constantinople. After his father died the family did poorly and moved to England for six years. They returned to Alexandria in 1877 but riots against Christians forced them to leave for Constantinople with his mother. He returned in 1885 to Alexandria and took up Greek citizenship, giving up British nationality. His work as a journalist and broker in the Egyptian Stock Exchange, allowed him to earn a modest living. At the age of 29 he took up employment in the Irrigation Service, where he worked until his retirement 30 years later. His mother lived with him until she died and then after a sojourn with his brothers, he lived alone for the last 25 years. He frequented cafés and had a small coterie of friends to talk with. They were the readers of his poems, privately published by him.
He was the last of nine children of well-to-do parents from Constantinople. After his father died the family did poorly and moved to England for six years. They returned to Alexandria in 1877 but riots against Christians forced them to leave for Constantinople with his mother. He returned in 1885 to Alexandria and took up Greek citizenship, giving up British nationality. His work as a journalist and broker in the Egyptian Stock Exchange, allowed him to earn a modest living. At the age of 29 he took up employment in the Irrigation Service, where he worked until his retirement 30 years later. His mother lived with him until she died and then after a sojourn with his brothers, he lived alone for the last 25 years. He frequented cafés and had a small coterie of friends to talk with. They were the readers of his poems, privately published by him.
His learning was vast but did not arise from the little formal education he had. Besides English, French, and Greek he could read Dante in Italian, and he developed a deep interest in Greek poetry from the ancients onwards. He allows that he was at various times under the influence of Keats and Shelley, Victor Hugo and Symbolist poets in France. He was 41 years old when the first volume of a mere 14 poems appeared in a private edition in 1905. Although he wrote 70 poems a year he kept only four or five and burned the rest. He would have been even less known but for a chance meeting with E. M. Forster during WWI. Forster had his poems translated and circulated them to T.S. Eliot and other literary figures in England.
Cavafy the poet (ca 1900) is quoted extensively throughout The Alexandria Quartet by Lawrence Durrell and presides over the four novels as a genius loci
Cavafy has remained a poet less known than he should be. His best known poem, Waiting for the Barbarians, was printed in 1904, six years after it was composed. Here it is in Evangelos Sachperoglou’s new translation (not the translation Talitha used):
– What are we waiting for, assembled in the Forum?
The barbarians are to arrive today.
– Why then such inactivity in the Senate?
Why do the Senators sit back and do not legislate?
Because the barbarians will arrive today.
What sort of laws now can Senators enact?
When the barbarians come, they’ll do the legislating.
Why do the Senators sit back and do not legislate?
Because the barbarians will arrive today.
What sort of laws now can Senators enact?
When the barbarians come, they’ll do the legislating.
– Why is our emperor up and about so early,
and seated at the grandest gate of our city, upon the throne,
in state, wearing the crown?
and seated at the grandest gate of our city, upon the throne,
in state, wearing the crown?
Because the barbarians will arrive today.
And the emperor expects to receive their leader.
Indeed, he has prepared to present him
with a parchment scroll. Thereon he has
invested him with many names and titles.
And the emperor expects to receive their leader.
Indeed, he has prepared to present him
with a parchment scroll. Thereon he has
invested him with many names and titles.
– Why have our two consuls and the praetors come out
today in their purple, embroidered togas;
why did they put on bracelets studded with amethysts,
and rings with resplendent, glittering emeralds;
why are they carrying today precious staves
carved exquisitely in gold and silver?
today in their purple, embroidered togas;
why did they put on bracelets studded with amethysts,
and rings with resplendent, glittering emeralds;
why are they carrying today precious staves
carved exquisitely in gold and silver?
Because the barbarians will arrive today
and such things dazzle the barbarians.
and such things dazzle the barbarians.
– And why don’t our worthy orators, as always, come out
to deliver their speeches, to have their usual say?
to deliver their speeches, to have their usual say?
Because the barbarians will arrive today;
and they get bored with eloquence and orations.
and they get bored with eloquence and orations.
– Why has there suddenly begun all this commotion,
and this confusion? (How solemn people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and the squares emptying so swiftly,
and everyone is returning home in deep preoccupation?
and this confusion? (How solemn people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and the squares emptying so swiftly,
and everyone is returning home in deep preoccupation?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.
And some people have arrived from the frontiers,
and said that there are no barbarians anymore.
And some people have arrived from the frontiers,
and said that there are no barbarians anymore.
—
And now, what will become of us without barbarians?
Those people were some sort of a solution.
Those people were some sort of a solution.
Th poem is a description of nation states that dream up enemies, real or imagined, as a diversion from the serious job of governing. And in any event the defenders give in before the enemy shows up. Self-delusion rules.
Cavafy’s total poetic oeuvre comprises 154 poems. About thirty more poems were discovered unfinished after his death and published. The poet classified his work into
– historical poems
– philosophical poems intended to provoke thought
– aesthetic poems (lyrics), dealing mainly with homosexual love
Some are sad poems defying classification like Supplication, where a mother prays before the icon of the Virgin for the safe return of her son from a voyage, but the Virgin already knows the son is lost at sea:
The sea took a sailor to its depths.--
His mother, unsuspecting, goes and lights
a tall candle before the Virgin Mary
for his speedy return and for fine weather --
and always she turns her ear to the wind.
But while she prays and implores,
the icon listens, solemn and sad,
knowing that the son she expects will no longer return.
Cavafy’s other great love was history.
He confessed his homosexuality was innate, though he had only one lasting relationship with a man, who later became the executor of his literary estate. There were more affairs of a casual nature. The poem Has Come to Rest celebrates one such encounter:
It must have been one o’clock at night,
perhaps half past one.
perhaps half past one.
In a corner of the taverna,
behind the wooden partition,
save for the two of us the place was altogether deserted.
A kerosene lamp gave scarcely any light at all.
The waiter, exhausted, nodded off in the doorway.
behind the wooden partition,
save for the two of us the place was altogether deserted.
A kerosene lamp gave scarcely any light at all.
The waiter, exhausted, nodded off in the doorway.
No one could actually see us. But we’d
already provoked ourselves so thoroughly
that we were incapable of restraint.
already provoked ourselves so thoroughly
that we were incapable of restraint.
Our clothing half-opened – not much to begin with,
that month of July being so divinely sultry.
that month of July being so divinely sultry.
The delight of flesh by means
of half-opened clothing;
a glimpse of bared flesh – an image enduring
26 years; and which now has come
to rest here in these verses.
of half-opened clothing;
a glimpse of bared flesh – an image enduring
26 years; and which now has come
to rest here in these verses.
Cavafy is sparse in the use of imagery or similes; his vocabulary is stoic and chaste in most of his poems. He used words for what they denoted and employed straightforward adjectives like ‘beautiful’ or ‘lovely’ or ‘young’, and left the rest to the reader’s imagination. A critic has faulted him for using clichés too often. But even in his plainness Cavafy can achieve elegance, as in his poem, Ithaca. As you journey to Ithaca in that poem, you learn and become satisfied, accepting the utmost that life has given you.
References:
The Collected Poems by C.P. Cavafy, translated by Evangelos Sachperoglou. Oxford, 238 pp., September 2007
The Canon by C.P. Cavafy, translated by Stratis Haviaras.
Harvard, 465 pp., January 2008
Taken from an article by the poet, Charles Simic in the London Book Review
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v30/n06/charles-simic/some-sort-of-a-solution
like the Algerian
who walked from his village, burning
References:
The Collected Poems by C.P. Cavafy, translated by Evangelos Sachperoglou. Oxford, 238 pp., September 2007
The Canon by C.P. Cavafy, translated by Stratis Haviaras.
Harvard, 465 pp., January 2008
Taken from an article by the poet, Charles Simic in the London Book Review
https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v30/n06/charles-simic/some-sort-of-a-solution
The Poems
Arundhaty – Ranjit Hoskote (born 1969)
The Ambassador's Report
I
Don't take this document by my hand for a sign
of finality, or this compass on the table
for masterful repose, or this globe
on the sill for order.
This room is a pose
of glass nouns.
Don't ask how we dragged the caravan across the desert,
hauled the cannon over the rim of the sand,
rafted the gulf, kept the gunpowder dry,
the ribs warm, the vultures
hungry.
II
An undertow of questions throws up its barbed hooks,
reversing the protocol of current behaviour.
My report digresses from the fishing of answers
in well-sounded depths. I have heard the westering sun
spit curses, the sudden calls
of momentary, blaspheming pheasants.
Back in the region called home, the highways have set
askew in the plastercast plain. Our pack mules limp.
After the pounding of the howitzers,
the gaunt lions looking out to sea
are looser-limbed, looser-lipped,
straw-maned, somewhat toothless.
III
An ambassador in an enemy country
must practise the austerities
of fable. He sees what he sees
through the Trappist eye
of the needle.
He cannot remember why he first set sail:
for trade, or better terms, or was it
in search of Eden?
He tries to reconstruct his longings
from the potsherds of his discoveries:
at the desert's farthest extremity,
he will close his notebook with a few tribes
bickering over dung heaps, boulders,
patches of yellowed grass, a few goats.
And two very old and withered trees.
(from Vanishing Acts: New and Selected Poems, 1985-2005 Ranjit Hoskote
Devika – Alfred Lord Tennyson (1809 – 1893)
The Charge of the Light Brigade
by Alfred, Lord Tennyson
I
Half a league, half a league,
Half a league onward,
All in the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
“Forward, the Light Brigade!
Charge for the guns!” he said.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
II
“Forward, the Light Brigade!”
Was there a man dismayed?
Not though the soldier knew
Someone had blundered.
Theirs not to make reply,
Theirs not to reason why,
Theirs but to do and die.
Into the valley of Death
Rode the six hundred.
III
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon in front of them
Volleyed and thundered;
Stormed at with shot and shell,
Boldly they rode and well,
Into the jaws of Death,
Into the mouth of hell
Rode the six hundred.
IV
Flashed all their sabres bare,
Flashed as they turned in air
Sabring the gunners there,
Charging an army, while
All the world wondered.
Plunged in the battery-smoke
Right through the line they broke;
Cossack and Russian
Reeled from the sabre stroke
Shattered and sundered.
Then they rode back, but not
Not the six hundred.
V
Cannon to right of them,
Cannon to left of them,
Cannon behind them
Volleyed and thundered;
Stormed at with shot and shell,
While horse and hero fell.
They that had fought so well
Came through the jaws of Death,
Back from the mouth of hell,
All that was left of them,
Left of six hundred.
VI
When can their glory fade?
O the wild charge they made!
All the world wondered.
Honour the charge they made!
Honour the Light Brigade,
Noble six hundred!
Pamela – Maya Angelou (1928 – 2014)
A Brave And Startling Truth
We, this people, on a small and lonely planet
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth
And when we come to it
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms
When we come to it
When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate
And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean
When battlefields and coliseum
No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil
When the rapacious storming of the churches
The screaming racket in the temples have ceased
When the pennants are waving gaily
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze
When we come to it
When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders
And children dress their dolls in flags of truce
When land mines of death have been removed
And the aged can walk into evenings of peace
When religious ritual is not perfumed
By the incense of burning flesh
And childhood dreams are not kicked awake
By nightmares of abuse
When we come to it
Then we will confess that not the Pyramids
With their stones set in mysterious perfection
Nor the Gardens of Babylon
Hanging as eternal beauty
In our collective memory
Not the Grand Canyon
Kindled into delicious color
By Western sunsets
Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe
Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji
Stretching to the Rising Sun
Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,
Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores
These are not the only wonders of the world
When we come to it
We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace
We, this people on this mote of matter
In whose mouths abide cankerous words
Which challenge our very existence
Yet out of those same mouths
Come songs of such exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in its labor
And the body is quieted into awe
We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines
When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear
When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.
Traveling through casual space
Past aloof stars, across the way of indifferent suns
To a destination where all signs tell us
It is possible and imperative that we learn
A brave and startling truth
And when we come to it
To the day of peacemaking
When we release our fingers
From fists of hostility
And allow the pure air to cool our palms
When we come to it
When the curtain falls on the minstrel show of hate
And faces sooted with scorn are scrubbed clean
When battlefields and coliseum
No longer rake our unique and particular sons and daughters
Up with the bruised and bloody grass
To lie in identical plots in foreign soil
When the rapacious storming of the churches
The screaming racket in the temples have ceased
When the pennants are waving gaily
When the banners of the world tremble
Stoutly in the good, clean breeze
When we come to it
When we let the rifles fall from our shoulders
And children dress their dolls in flags of truce
When land mines of death have been removed
And the aged can walk into evenings of peace
When religious ritual is not perfumed
By the incense of burning flesh
And childhood dreams are not kicked awake
By nightmares of abuse
When we come to it
Then we will confess that not the Pyramids
With their stones set in mysterious perfection
Nor the Gardens of Babylon
Hanging as eternal beauty
In our collective memory
Not the Grand Canyon
Kindled into delicious color
By Western sunsets
Nor the Danube, flowing its blue soul into Europe
Not the sacred peak of Mount Fuji
Stretching to the Rising Sun
Neither Father Amazon nor Mother Mississippi who, without favor,
Nurture all creatures in the depths and on the shores
These are not the only wonders of the world
When we come to it
We, this people, on this minuscule and kithless globe
Who reach daily for the bomb, the blade and the dagger
Yet who petition in the dark for tokens of peace
We, this people on this mote of matter
In whose mouths abide cankerous words
Which challenge our very existence
Yet out of those same mouths
Come songs of such exquisite sweetness
That the heart falters in its labor
And the body is quieted into awe
We, this people, on this small and drifting planet
Whose hands can strike with such abandon
That in a twinkling, life is sapped from the living
Yet those same hands can touch with such healing, irresistible tenderness
That the haughty neck is happy to bow
And the proud back is glad to bend
Out of such chaos, of such contradiction
We learn that we are neither devils nor divines
When we come to it
We, this people, on this wayward, floating body
Created on this earth, of this earth
Have the power to fashion for this earth
A climate where every man and every woman
Can live freely without sanctimonious piety
Without crippling fear
When we come to it
We must confess that we are the possible
We are the miraculous, the true wonder of this world
That is when, and only when
We come to it.
KumKum – Adrienne Rich (1929 – 2012)
In Those Years
In those years, people will say, we lost track
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
and the whole thing became
silly, ironic, terrible:
we were trying to live a personal life
and yes, that was the only life
we could bear witness to
of the meaning of we, of you
we found ourselves
reduced to I
and the whole thing became
silly, ironic, terrible:
we were trying to live a personal life
and yes, that was the only life
we could bear witness to
But the great dark birds of history screamed and plunged
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
along the shore, through the rags of fog
where we stood, saying I
into our personal weather
They were headed somewhere else but their beaks and pinions drove
along the shore, through the rags of fog
where we stood, saying I
Our Whole Life
Our whole life a translation
Our whole life a translation
the permissible fibs
and now a knot of lies
eating at itself to get undone
eating at itself to get undone
Words bitten thru words
meanings burnt-off like paint
under the blowtorch
under the blowtorch
All those dead letters
rendered into the oppressor's language
rendered into the oppressor's language
Trying to tell the doctor where it hurts
like the Algerian
who walked from his village, burning
his whole body a cloud of pain
and there are no words for this
and there are no words for this
except himself
(This poem appeared in the May 2, 1970 issue of The New Republic magazine)
Thommo – Maggie Smith (born 1977)
What I carried
I carried my fear of the world
to my children, but they refused it.
I carried my fear of the world
on my chest, where I once carried
my children, where some nights it slept
as newborns sleep, where it purred
but mostly growled, where it licked
sweat from my clavicles.
I carried my fear of the world
and apprenticed myself to the fear.
I carried my fear of the world
and it became my teacher.
I carried it, and it repaid me
by teaching me how to carry it.
I carried my fear of the world
the way an animal carries a kill in its jaws
but in reverse: I was the kill, the gift.
Whose feet would I be left at?
I carried my fear of the world
as if it could protect me from the world.
I carried my fear of the world
and for my children modeled marveling
at its beauty but keeping my hands still —
keeping my eyes on its mouth, its teeth.
I carried my fear of the world.
I stroked it or I did not dare to stroke it.
I carried my fear of the world
and it became my teacher.
It taught me how to keep quiet and still
I carried my fear of the world
and my love for the world.
I carried my terrible awe.
I carried my fear of the world
without knowing how to set it down.
I carried my fear of the world
and let it nuzzle close to me,
and when it nipped, when it bit
down hard to taste me, part of me
shined: I had been right.
I carried my fear of the world
and it taught me I had been right.
I carried it and loved it
for making me right.
I carried my fear of the world
and it taught me how to carry it.
I carried my fear of the world
to my children and laid it down
at their feet, a kill, a gift.
Or I was laid at their feet.
How Dark the Beginning
All we ever talk of is light—
let there be light, there was light then,
good light—but what I consider
dawn is darker than all that.
So many hours between the day
receding and what we recognize
as morning, the sun cresting
like a wave that won’t break
over us—as if light were protective,
as if no hearts were flayed,
no bodies broken on a day
like today. In any film,
the sunrise tells us everything
will be all right. Danger wouldn’t
dare show up now, dragging
its shadow across the screen.
We talk so much of light, please
let me speak on behalf
of the good dark. Let us
talk more of how dark
the beginning of a day is.
Shoba – Mary Oliver (1935 – 2019)
The Summer Day
Who made the world?
Who made the swan, and the black bear?
Who made the grasshopper?
This grasshopper, I mean –
the one who has flung herself out of the grass,
the one who is eating sugar out of my hand,
who is moving her jaws back and forth instead of up and down –
who is gazing around with her enormous and complicated eyes.
Now she lifts her pale forearms and thoroughly washes her face.
Now she snaps her wings open, and floats away.
I don't know exactly what a prayer is.
I do know how to pay attention, how to fall down
into the grass, how to kneel down in the grass,
how to be idle and blessed, how to stroll through the fields,
which is what I have been doing all day.
Tell me, what else should I have done?
Doesn't everything die at last, and too soon?
Tell me, what is it you plan to do
with your one wild and precious life?
Song for Autumn
Don’t you imagine the leaves dream now
how comfortable it will be to touch
the earth instead of the
nothingness of the air and the endless
freshets of wind? And don’t you think
the trees, especially those with
mossy hollows, are beginning to look for
how comfortable it will be to touch
the earth instead of the
nothingness of the air and the endless
freshets of wind? And don’t you think
the trees, especially those with
mossy hollows, are beginning to look for
the birds that will come—six, a dozen—to sleep
inside their bodies? And don’t you hear
the goldenrod whispering goodbye,
the everlasting being crowned with the first
tuffets of snow? The pond
stiffens and the white field over which
the fox runs so quickly brings out
its long blue shadows. The wind wags
its many tails. And in the evening
the piled firewood shifts a little,
longing to be on its way.
inside their bodies? And don’t you hear
the goldenrod whispering goodbye,
the everlasting being crowned with the first
tuffets of snow? The pond
stiffens and the white field over which
the fox runs so quickly brings out
its long blue shadows. The wind wags
its many tails. And in the evening
the piled firewood shifts a little,
longing to be on its way.
Geeta – Christina Rossetti (1830 – 1894)
Up-Hill by Christina Rossetti
Does the road wind up-hill all the way?
Yes, to the very end.
Will the day’s journey take the whole long day?
From morn to night, my friend.
But is there for the night a resting-place?
A roof for when the slow dark hours begin.
May not the darkness hide it from my face?
You cannot miss that inn.
Shall I meet other wayfarers at night?
Those who have gone before.
Then must I knock, or call when just in sight?
They will not keep you standing at that door.
Shall I find comfort, travel-sore and weak?
Of labour you shall find the sum.
Will there be beds for me and all who seek?
Yea, beds for all who come.
Priya – James Arthur Baldwin (1924 – 1987)
Staggerlee wonders, Part 3, by James Baldwin
I wonder how they think
the niggers made, make it,
how come the niggers are still here.
But, then, again, I don't think they dare
to think of that: no:
I'm fairly certain they don't think of that at all.
Lord,
I with the alabaster lady of the house,
with Beulah.
Beulah about sixty, built in four-square,
biceps like Mohammed Ali,
she at the stove, fixing biscuits,
scrambling eggs and bacon, fixing coffee,
pouring juice, and the lady of the house,
she say, she don't know how
she'd get along without Beulah
and Beulah just silently grunts,
I reckon you don't,
and keeps on keeping on
and the lady of the house say
She's just like one of the family,
and Beulah turns, gives me a look,
sucks her teeth and rolls her eyes
in the direction of the lady's back, and
keeps on keeping on.
While they are containing
Russia
and entering onto the quicksand of
China
and patronizing
Africa,
and calculating
the Caribbean plunder, and
the South China Sea booty,
the niggers are aware that no one has discussed
anything at all with the niggers.
Well. Niggers don't own nothing,
got no flag, even our names
are hand-me-downs
and you don't change that
by calling yourself X:
sometimes that just makes it worse,
like obliterating the path that leads back
to whence you came, and
to where you can begin.
And, anyway, none of this changes the reality,
which is, for example, that I do not want my son
to die in Guantanamo,
or anywhere else, for that matter,
serving the Stars and Stripes.
(I've seen some stars.
I got some stripes.)
Neither (incidentally)
has anyone discussed the Bomb with the niggers:
the incoherent feeling is, the less
the nigger knows about the Bomb, the better:
the lady of the house
smiles nervously in your direction
as though she had just been overheard
discussing family, or sexual secrets,
and changes the subject to Education,
or Full Employment, or the Welfare rolls,
the smile saying, Don't be dismayed.
We know how you feel. You can trust us.
Yeah. I would like to believe you.
But we are not talking about belief.
Zakia – Amy Lawrence Lowell (1874 – 1925)
Patterns by Amy Lowell
I walk down the garden paths,
And all the daffodils
Are blowing, and the bright blue squills.
I walk down the patterned garden paths
In my stiff, brocaded gown.
With my powdered hair and jewelled fan,
I too am a rare
Pattern. As I wander down
The garden paths.
My dress is richly figured,
And the train
Makes a pink and silver stain
On the gravel, and the thrift
Of the borders.
Just a plate of current fashion,
Tripping by in high-heeled, ribboned shoes.
Not a softness anywhere about me,
Only whale-bone and brocade.
And I sink on a seat in the shade
Of a lime tree. For my passion
Wars against the stiff brocade.
The daffodils and squills
Flutter in the breeze
As they please.
And I weep;
For the lime tree is in blossom
And one small flower has dropped upon my bosom.
And the splashing of waterdrops
In the marble fountain
Comes down the garden paths.
The dripping never stops.
Underneath my stiffened gown
Is the softness of a woman bathing in a marble basin,
A basin in the midst of hedges grown
So thick, she cannot see her lover hiding,
But she guesses he is near,
And the sliding of the water
Seems the stroking of a dear
Hand upon her.
What is Summer in a fine brocaded gown!
I should like to see it lying in a heap upon the ground.
All the pink and silver crumpled up on the ground.
I would be the pink and silver as I ran along the paths,
And he would stumble after,
Bewildered by my laughter.
I should see the sun flashing from his sword-hilt and the buckles on his shoes.
I would choose
To lead him in a maze along the patterned paths,
A bright and laughing maze for my heavy-booted lover,
Till he caught me in the shade,
And the buttons of his waistcoat bruised my body as he clasped me,
Aching, melting, unafraid.
With the shadows of the leaves and the sundrops,
And the plopping of the waterdrops,
All about us in the open afternoon—
I am very like to swoon
With the weight of this brocade,
For the sun sifts through the shade.
Underneath the fallen blossom
In my bosom,
Is a letter I have hid.
It was brought to me this morning by a rider from the Duke.
“Madam, we regret to inform you that Lord Hartwell
Died in action Thursday sen’night.”
As I read it in the white, morning sunlight,
The letters squirmed like snakes.
“Any answer, Madam,” said my footman.
“No,” l told him.
“See that the messenger takes some refreshment.
No, no answer.”
And I walked into the garden,
Up and down the patterned paths,
In my stiff, correct brocade.
The blue and yellow flowers stood up proudly in the sun,
Each one.
I stood upright too,
Held rigid to the pattern
By the stiffness of my gown.
Up and down I walked,
Up and down.
In a month he would have been my husband.
In a month, here, underneath this lime,
We would have broke the pattern;
He for me, and I for him,
He as Colonel, I as Lady,
On this shady seat.
He had a whim
That sunlight carried blessing.
And I answered, “It shall be as you have said.”
Now he is dead.
In Summer and in Winter I shall walk
Up and down
The patterned garden paths
In my stiff, brocaded gown.
The squills and daffodils
Will give place to pillared roses, and to asters, and to snow.
I shall go
Up and down,
In my gown.
Gorgeously arrayed,
Boned and stayed.
And the softness of my body will be guarded from embrace
By each button, hook, and lace.
For the man who should loose me is dead,
Fighting with the Duke in Flanders,
In a pattern called a war.
Christ! What are patterns for?
Joe – Oliver St. John Gogarty (1878 – 1957)
The Image-Maker
by Oliver St. John Gogarty
Hard is the stone, but harder still
The delicate preforming will
That, guided by a dream alone,
Subdues and moulds the hardest stone,
Making the stubborn jade release
The emblem of eternal peace.
If but the will be firmly bent,
No stuff resists the mind's intent;
The adamant abets his skill
And sternly aids the artist's will,
To clothe in perdurable pride
Beauty his transient eyes descried.
Palinode
TWENTY years are gone
Down the winding road,
Years in which it shone
More often than it snowed;
And now old Time brings on,
Brings on the palinode.
I have been full of mirth;
I have been full of wine;
And I have trod the earth
As if it all were mine;
And laughed to bring to birth
The lighter lyric line.
Before it was too late,
One thing I learnt and saw:
Prophets anticipate
What Time brings round by law;
Call age before its date
To darken Youth with awe.
Why should you drink the rue?
Or leave in righteous rage
A world that will leave you
Howe'er you walk the stage?
Time needs no help to do
His miracle of age.
A few years more to flow
From miracle-working Time,
And surely I shall grow
Incapable of rhyme,
Sans Love and Song, and so
An echo of a mime.
Yet if my stone set forth
The merry Attic blade’s
Remark, I shall have worth
Achieved before Life fades:
‘A gentle man on Earth
And gentle ’mid the Shades.
Geetha – George Gordon Lord Byron (1788 – 1824)
When coldness Wraps This Suffering Clay
When coldness wraps this suffering clay,
Ah! whither strays the immortal mind?
It cannot die, it cannot stay,
But leaves its darken’d dust behind.
Then, unembodied, doth it trace
By steps each planet’s heavenly way?
Or fill at once the realms of space,
A thing of eyes, that all survey?
Eternal, boundless, undecay’d,
A thought unseen, but seeing all,
All, all in earth or skies display’d,
Shall it survey, shall it recall:
Each fainter trace that memory holds
So darkly of departed years,
In one broad glance the soul beholds,
And all, that was, at once appears.
Before Creation peopled earth,
Its eye shall roll through chaos back;
And where the farthest heaven had birth,
The spirit trace its rising track.
And where the future mars or makes,
Its glance dilate o’er all to be,
While sun is quench’d or system breaks,
Fix’d in its own eternity.
Above or Love, Hope, Hate, or Fear,
It lives all passionless and pure:
An age shall fleet like earthly year;
Its years as moments shall endure.
Away, away, without a wing,
O’er all, through all, its thought shall fly,
A nameless and eternal thing,
Forgetting what it was to die.
Gopa – Rudyard Kipling (1865 – 1936)
Mandalay
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, lookin' lazy at the sea,
There's a Burma girl a-settin', and I know she thinks o' me;
For the wind is in the palm-trees, and the temple-bells they say:
"Come you back, you British soldier; come you back to Mandalay!"
Come you back to Mandalay,
Where the old Flotilla lay:
Can't you 'ear their paddles chunkin' from Rangoon to Mandalay?
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin'-fishes play,
An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay!
'Er petticoat was yaller an' 'er little cap was green,
An' 'er name was Supi-yaw-lat — jes' the same as Theebaw's Queen,
An' I seed her first a-smokin' of a whackin' white cheroot,
An' a-wastin' Christian kisses on an 'eathen idol's foot:
Bloomin' idol made o'mud —
Wot they called the Great Gawd Budd —
Plucky lot she cared for idols when I kissed 'er where she stud!
On the road to Mandalay . . .
When the mist was on the rice-fields an' the sun was droppin' slow,
She'd git 'er little banjo an' she'd sing "~Kulla-lo-lo!~"
With 'er arm upon my shoulder an' 'er cheek agin' my cheek
We useter watch the steamers an' the ~hathis~ pilin' teak.
Elephints a-pilin' teak
In the sludgy, squdgy creek,
Where the silence 'ung that 'eavy you was 'arf afraid to speak!
On the road to Mandalay . . .
But that's all shove be'ind me — long ago an' fur away,
An' there ain't no 'busses runnin' from the Bank to Mandalay;
An' I'm learnin' 'ere in London what the ten-year soldier tells:
"If you've 'eard the East a-callin', you won't never 'eed naught else."
No! you won't 'eed nothin' else
But them spicy garlic smells,
An' the sunshine an' the palm-trees an' the tinkly temple-bells;
On the road to Mandalay . . .
I am sick o' wastin' leather on these gritty pavin'-stones,
An' the blasted Henglish drizzle wakes the fever in my bones;
Tho' I walks with fifty 'ousemaids outer Chelsea to the Strand,
An' they talks a lot o' lovin', but wot do they understand?
Beefy face an' grubby 'and —
Law! wot do they understand?
I've a neater, sweeter maiden in a cleaner, greener land!
On the road to Mandalay . . .
Ship me somewheres east of Suez, where the best is like the worst,
Where there aren't no Ten Commandments an' a man can raise a thirst;
For the temple-bells are callin', an' it's there that I would be —
By the old Moulmein Pagoda, looking lazy at the sea;
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the old Flotilla lay,
With our sick beneath the awnings when we went to Mandalay!
On the road to Mandalay,
Where the flyin'-fishes play,
An' the dawn comes up like thunder outer China 'crost the Bay!
Kavita – Wyatt Townley (born 1954)
Finding the Scarf
The woods are the book
we read over and over as children.
Now trees lie at angles, felled
by lightning, torn by tornados,
silvered trunks turning back
to earth. Late November light
slants through the oaks
as our small parade, father, mother, child,
shushes along, the wind searching treetops
for the last leaf. Childhood lies
on the forest floor, not evergreen
but oaken, its branches latched
to a graying sky. Here is the scarf
we left years ago like a bookmark,
meaning to return the next day,
having just turned our heads
toward a noise in the bushes,
toward the dinnerbell in the distance,
toward what we knew and did not know
we knew, in the spreading twilight
that returns changed to a changed place.
Saras – Stephen Dunn (born 1939)
The Photograph In The Hallway
You've seen it perhaps in the wrong setting,
a photograph of lovers in a haze
of abandon, everything in the room
background to their special dance.
Lacking nothing else,
what they seem to need is oxygen
though this is the emergency
all of us try to arrive at,
equally breathless and contorted.
We've named it
"Mutual Generosity", two people
stopped in the gorgeous
equipoise outside of time.
We're not deceived by such bliss;
the lovers have long ago returned
to the difficulties of loving.
Theirs is a moving picture now
subject to cool, inexorable laws.
But to say so is a pettiness.
Let us celebrate the photograph in the hallway
as it is, which is as it might be
for you, after some straight line
in your life collapsed
under the beautiful weight of chance.
Let us stop and imagine it,
our fingers palpitating
as if their tips were missing—
such homelessness and longing in them,
such a desire to be properly lost.
Men in Winter
All winter we stayed in, making light
of the day, watching the clouds become
elephants, replicas of Italy, beards.
We called it trivial, what was outside
Of us. It was so much fun.
When the nights came with their villainous
capes, we said what a bad movie
we live in, and wondered who was
to be saved this time, ha ha
and weren't the clouds low these days,
like aristocrats. It was a way
of passing time. We believed each of us
had a summer inside him, several deserted
beaches, a cove. When Spring came,
we'd had so much of ourselves we said who cares
and opened our doors like mad sailors
in a submarine, fathoms from this world.
Talitha – Constantine P. Cavafy (1863 – 1933)
Waiting for the Barbarians
What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?
The barbarians are due here today.
Why isn’t anything going on in the senate?
Why are the senators sitting there without legislating?
Because the barbarians are coming today.
What’s the point of senators making laws now?
Once the barbarians are here, they’ll do the legislating.
Why did our emperor get up so early,
and why is he sitting enthroned at the city’s main gate,
in state, wearing the crown?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and the emperor’s waiting to receive their leader.
He’s even got a scroll to give him,
loaded with titles, with imposing names.
Why have our two consuls and praetors come out today
wearing their embroidered, their scarlet togas?
Why have they put on bracelets with so many amethysts,
rings sparkling with magnificent emeralds?
Why are they carrying elegant canes
beautifully worked in silver and gold?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and things like that dazzle the barbarians.
Why don’t our distinguished orators turn up as usual
to make their speeches, say what they have to say?
Because the barbarians are coming today
and they’re bored by rhetoric and public speaking.
Why this sudden bewilderment, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home lost in thought?
Because night has fallen and the barbarians haven't come.
And some of our men just in from the border say
there are no barbarians any longer.
Now what’s going to happen to us without barbarians?
Those people were a kind of solution.
(Translated from the Greek by Edmund Keeley)
The post is delightful reading. Thank you for recounting the session accurately and in such detail. Enjoyed reading and reliving the evening. I loved Arundhathy's pic: the lady with the red goggles.
ReplyDeleteThank you Joe for the detailed and accurate account of all the readers comments and thoughts expressed. An amazing read. We are truly grateful for the fleshing out of bios on the poet's etc which you painstakingly do for us. Bless you.
ReplyDeleteYou have outdone yourself in this blog, Joe!
ReplyDeleteIt reads like a piece from James Joyce. You used several beautiful, not so common words, also included so many interesting references in this blog that the journey prolonged in a very pleasant way.
Thank you dear members of KRG, it is your selection of poems and Poets that made our June 26th Session so interesting, and turned Joe, our blogger, truly a creative writer!
This is extravagant praise, dear KumKum! But it is certainly true that the choice of poems by KRG readers provoked in me a desire to read them again and find out more about the poets.
ReplyDeleteGlad you found delight in reading, dear Priya. What more can a blogger ask for?
ReplyDeleteLet me first say, what an amazing amazing job you have done with this time's Blog Post Joe! �� For the umpteenth time I wonder how you manage to capture every word of what each of us said , directly related or not, each and every bend and twist in the discussions. I salute you sir!
ReplyDeleteHello Arundhaty, I had the aid of the recording in Zoom, the option I turned on when we began. Usually, I just takes notes as we go along. The rest is finding references appropriate for what was said, adding some commentary, noting peripheral trifles, etc.
ReplyDeleteI hope there is some value for all of you, my dear readers.
Just read the blog.... so well compiled and beautiful pics add so much colour to it...
ReplyDeleteThank you, Joe, for sourcing and adding a picture of the squill flower in the poem 'Patterns'.
Glad you enjoyed, dear Zakia. I didn't recognise 'squill' the name of the flower, so I wanted to find what it was; it deserved a picture.
ReplyDeleteUndoubtedly James Baldwin has the best pictures in the post. Look at the one taken by the fashion photographer Richard Avedon, his longtime friend.
Thanks Joe. I too enjoyed reading the blog. There's such a lively flow to your writing! You mentioned even my prospective mimicking! ������
ReplyDeleteSo interesting to know about the words Cardigan etc.
Enjoyed the humour too. I could almost picture you saying those words.
Very well written as always. Thank you Joe
ReplyDeleteJoe, I have just finished reading your blog. The inserts and photographs and even you tube videos... just amazing!
ReplyDeleteHi Gopa,
ReplyDeleteI write for the delight of our readers, and it’s good to know I occasionally succeed. Thank you for your appreciation.