Horner's Corner

Let them not forget us, the weak souls among the asphodels Seferis — ‘Mythistorema’

For J.G. Farrell

Even now there are places where a thought might grow —

Peruvian mines, worked out and abandoned

To a slow clock of condensation,

An echo trapped forever, and a flutter

Of wildflowers in the lift-shaft,

Indian compounds where the wind dances

And a door bangs with diminished confidence,

Lime crevices behind rippling rainbarrels,

Dog corners for bone burials;

And a disused shed in Co. Wexford,

Deep in the grounds of a burnt-out hotel,

Among the bathtubs and the washbasins

A thousand mushrooms crowd to a keyhole.

This is the one star in their firmament

Or frames a star within a star.

What should they do there but desire?

So many days beyond the rhododendrons

With the world waltzing in its bowl of cloud,

They have learnt patience and silence

Listening to the rooks querulous in the high wood.

They have been waiting for us in a foetor

Of vegetable sweat since civil war days,

Since the gravel-crunching, interminable departure

of the expropriated mycologist.

He never came back, and light since then

Is a keyhole rusting gently after rain.

Spiders have spun, flies dusted to mildew

And once a day, perhaps, they have heard something —

A trickle of masonry, a shout from the blue

Or a lorry changing gear at the end of the lane.

There have been deaths, the pale flesh flaking

Into the earth that nourished it;

And nightmares, born of these and the grim

Dominion of stale air and rank moisture.

Those nearest the door growing strong —

‘Elbow room! Elbow room!’

The rest, dim in a twilight of crumbling

Utensils and broken flower-pots, groaning

For their deliverance, have been so long

Expectant that there is left only the posture.

A half century, without visitors, in the dark —

Poor preparation for the cracking lock

And creak of hinges. Magi, moonmen,

Powdery prisoners of the old regime,

Web-throated, stalked like triffids, racked by drought

And insomnia, only the ghost of a scream

At the flashbulb firing squad we wake them with

Shows there is life yet in their feverish forms.

Grown beyond nature now, soft food for worms,

They lift frail heads in gravity and good faith.

They are begging us, you see, in their wordless way,

To do something, to speak on their behalf

Or at least not to close the door again.

Lost people of Treblinka and Pompeii!

‘Save us, save us,’ they seem to say,

‘Let the god not abandon us

Who have come so far in darkness and in pain.

We too had our lives to live.

You with your light meter and relaxed itinerary,

Let not our naive labours have been in vain!

Derek Mahon

Tweet This Post

 

 

 

 

Be not afeard. The isle is full of noises,

Sounds and sweet airs that give delight and hurt not.

Sometimes a thousand twangling instruments

Will hum about mine ears, and sometime voices

That, if I then had waked after long sleep,

Will make me sleep again; and then, in dreaming,

The clouds methought would open, and show riches

Ready to drop upon me, that when I waked,

I cried to dream again.

The Tempest 3.2.148-156

Tweet This Post

These are the years which furnish no repentance

Though seamed with sore regret:

So much would selflessly be done and yet

Print no true sentence.

That grief sits down in books but is no writer

Must be the just rebuke,

And every lightless evening proves a fluke

The one grown brighter.

A careless management of things, they call it

Who pose for God or Fate

The purpose of the Infinite and Great

And here install it.

These decades, all the decimals of feeling,

Are pressing on our schemes.

On childhood walls, on corridors of dreams,

The paint is peeling.

Tweet This Post

 

 

 

– William Blake : The Four Zoas.

Tweet This Post

Ludwig Wittgenstein

b.April 27, 1889

Photographed by Ben Richards in Swansea

_______________________

Wittgenstein’s Dream

Peter Porter

I had taken my boat out on the fiord,

I get so dreadfully morose at five,

I went in and put Nature on my hatstand

And considering the Sinking of the Eveninglands

And laughed at what translation may contrive

And worked at mathematics and was bored.

(….)

After dinner I read myself to sleep,

After which I dreamt the Eastern Front

After an exchange of howitzers,

The Angel of Death was taking what was hers,

The finger missed me but the guns still grunt

The syntax of the real, the rules they keep.

And then I woke in my own corner bed

And turned away and cried into the wall

And cursed the world which Mozart had to leave.

I heard a voice which told me not to grieve,

I heard myself. ‘Tell them’, I said to all,

‘I’ve had a wonderful life. I’m dead.’

…(more)

_______________________

Wittgenstein

rowing from Skjolden to his house

Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Biographical Sketch

via ::: wood s lot ::: “the fitful tracing of a portal”.

Tweet This Post

At the City University of New Yorks Graduate Center, a friend of mine named Lydia Hazen is testing subjects to see whether they have greater perception of certain colors or shapes after reading poems by Wallace Stevens. Shes engaged in what the New York Times recently dubbed “neuroscience lit crit,” in an article wondering whether its “the next big thing” in literary studies. ? Exciting – but hardly the “new thing”; it should more accurately be called an experimental trope on the oldest traditions of modern literary criticism and philosophy in the work of Samuel Taylor Coleridge 1772-1834. The infamous English Romantic – opium addict, plagiarist, long-winded talker and poet of fragments – was also a metacognitive theorist far ahead of his time, who now appears to me a startlingly contemporary figure. Today, we have blogs, text-messages, FaceBook updates, Twitter. Coleridge had his notebooks

Read more here: via 3quarksdaily.

Tweet This Post

Basil Bunting

(1900 – 1985)

“Compose aloud; poetry is sound.” – Advice to young poets, Basil Bunting

Basil Bunting (1900-1985) is best known for his long poem ‘Briggflatts’ which has come to be recognised as one of the key texts of British modernism.

more via Basil Bunting – Poetry Archive.

Tweet This Post

Photograph © Jonathan Williams

Nothing

substance utters or time

stills and restrains

joins design and

supple measure deftly

as thought’s intricate polyphonic

score dovetails with the tread

sensuous things

keep in our consciousness.

Celebrate man’s craft

and the word spoken in shapeless night, the

sharp tool paring away

waste and the forms

cut out of mystery!

When taut string’s note

passes ears’ reach or red rays or violet

fade, strong over unseen

forces the word

ranks and enumerates…

mimes clouds condensed

and hewn hills and bristling forests,

steadfast corn in its season

and the seasons

in their due array,

life of man’s own body

and death…

The sound thins into melody,

discourse narrowing, craft

failing, design

petering out.

Ears heavy to breeze of speech and

thud of the ictus.

Basil Bunting, from Odes

via ::: wood s lot ::: “the fitful tracing of a portal”.

Tweet This Post

The sea is calm tonight,

The tide is full, the moon lies fair

Upon the straits; on the French coast the light

Gleams and is gone; the cliffs of England stand,

Glimmering and vast, out in the tranquil bay.

Come to the window, sweet is the night air!

Only, from the long line of spray

Where the sea meets the moon-blanched land,

Listen! you hear the grating roar

Of pebbles which the waves draw back, and fling,

At their return, up the high strand,

Begin, and cease, and then again begin,

With tremulous cadence slow, and bring

The eternal note of sadness in.

Sophocles long ago

Heard it on the Agean, and it brought

Into his mind the turbid ebb and flow

Of human misery; we

Find also in the sound a thought,

Hearing it by this distant northern sea.

The Sea of Faith

Was once, too, at the full, and round earth’s shore

Lay like the folds of a bright girdle furled.

But now I only hear

Its melancholy, long, withdrawing roar,

Retreating, to the breath

Of the night wind, down the vast edges drear

And naked shingles of the world.

Ah, love, let us be true

To one another! for the world, which seems

To lie before us like a land of dreams,

So various, so beautiful, so new,

Hath really neither joy, nor love, nor light,

Nor certitude, nor peace, nor help for pain;

And we are here as on a darkling plain

Swept with confused alarms of struggle and flight,

Where ignorant armies clash by night.

1867

Tweet This Post

I Know a Man

As I sd to my
friend, because I am
always talking, — John, I

sd, which was not his
name, the darkness sur-
rounds us, what

can we do against
it, or else, shall we &
why not, buy a goddamn big car,

drive, he sd, for
christ’s sake, look
out where yr going

1954

Tweet This Post

Tweet This Post

Looking up at the stars, I know quite well

That, for all they care, I can go to hell,

But on earth indifference is the least

We have to dread from man or beast.

How should we like it were stars to burn

With a passion for us we could not return?

If equal affection cannot be,

Let the more loving one be me.

Admirer as I think I am

Of stars that do not give a damn.

I cannot, now I see them, say

I missed one terribly all day.

Were all stars to disappear or die,

I should learn to look at an empty sky

And feel its total dark sublime,

Though this might take me a little time.

by W.H. Auden – Feb, 21, 1907- Sept 29, 1973

Tweet This Post

There rolls the deep where grew the tree.

O earth, what changes hast thou seen!

There where the long street roars, hath been

The stillness of the central sea.

The hills are shadows, and they flow

From form to form, and nothing stands;

They melt like mist, the solid lands,

Like clouds they shape themselves and go.

But in my spirit will I dwell,

And dream my dream, and hold it true;

For tho’ my lips may breathe adieu,

I cannot think the thing farewell.

CXXIII from In Memoriam – Tennyson

Tweet This Post

Call the roller of big cigars,
The muscular one, and bid him whip
In kitchen cups concupiscent curds.
Let the wenches dawdle in such dress
As they are used to wear, and let the boys
Bring flowers in last month’s newspapers.
Let be be finale of seem.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Take from the dresser of deal,
Lacking the three glass knobs, that sheet
On which she embroidered fantails once
And spread it so as to cover her face.
If her horny feet protrude, they come
To show how cold she is, and dumb.
Let the lamp affix its beam.
The only emperor is the emperor of ice-cream.

Wallace Stevens

Tweet This Post

When Wallace Stevens died, few of his Connecticut insurance colleagues even knew he was a poet. With the recent release of his “Selected Poems”, Ryan Ruby revisits a man who proved that to be a great poet, no great experience is necessary …

Special to MORE INTELLIGENT LIFE

You can find them anywhere you go. Unshaven young men who slam down cheap liquor in remodelled dives. From their stools they hold forth on the doctrines of this obscure mystic or that obscurantist philosopher, and then they brawl for brawling’s sake. They swap stories about the tiny towns they reached by thumbing a ride or hopping the rails, tales that invariably end with a night in jail or the gutter and a rescue from some local angel. This is what’s known as Experience, to be distilled into stanzas that can fit within the circumference of the bottle stains on their cocktail napkins.

These are lifestyle poets, the Beats of yesteryear. Should you find yourself in the presence of one, ask him (always him) whether he likes the poetry of Wallace Stevens. Not one will say yes.

To a lifestyle poet, Stevens’s biography presents a problem. Born in 1879 in Reading, Pennsylvania, Stevens never quite became a member of the Lost Generation. He considered moving to Paris to become a writer, but caved to pressure from his lawyer father and stayed in the States, where he studied at Harvard and earned a degree from New York Law School. In 1916 he and his wife abandoned the bohemia of New York’s Greenwich Village for sleepy Hartford, Connecticut, where Stevens began work for a local insurance company. By 1934 he had become vice president of the Hartford Accident and Indemnity Company, a post he would keep until his death from stomach cancer in 1955, aged 75.

Stevens published “Harmonium”, his first book and one of the most important collections of 20th-century verse, when he was 44. He went on to win two National Book Awards, a Bollingen and the Pulitzer, yet when he died, his office colleagues were surprised to learn that he had been anything but an insurance executive. “It gives a man character as a poet to have this daily contact with a job,” he once said in a newspaper interview.

“I have no life except in poetry,” Stevens once wrote to himself in the late 1930s. To put it another way, he was a square. But lifestyle poets–like autobiographical novelists–are wrong to believe that experience is the necessary foundation for what one writes. The faculty sustaining the literary enterprise has always been the imagination. This “is the power that enables us to perceive the normal in the abnormal, the opposite of chaos in chaos,” Stevens wrote in “The Necessary Angel”, a book of his essays published in 1951.

Lifestyle poets remind me of the critics in Stevens’s poem, “The Man with the Blue Guitar”, who tell the titular musician:

‘But play you must,
A tune beyond us, yet ourselves,

A tune upon the blue guitar
Of things exactly as they are.’

What these critics fail to understand is not only that, “Things as they are / Are changed upon the blue guitar,” but that this transformation is necessary for any form of transcendence to be possible. Like the tune, a poem cannot be both “beyond us, yet ourselves” if it all it manages to do is describe things “exactly as
they are”.

In Wallace Stevens the transformative power of the imagination has found an enduring champion. His oeuvre is densely populated with poems bearing unashamedly cerebral titles, such as “Reality is an Activity of the Most August Imagination”, “Notes toward a Supreme Fiction”, “The World as Meditation” and “The Poem that took the Place of a Mountain”.  According to the Online Concordance to Wallace Stevens’ Poetry, a handy tool set up by John N. Serio, the editor behind the recently released “Wallace Stevens: Selected Poems“, the word “imagination” appears 47 times in his work (not including cognates such as “imagine”), beating out such poetic tropes as “sight”, “shadow” and “image.”

Stevens proved that to be a great poet, no great experience is necessary. You needn’t go off to war like Byron or take to the road like Kerouac to have yourself an adventure. If your mind is expansive enough, you needn’t even leave your chair. “Merely in living as and where we live” the air is already “swarming / with metaphysical changes,” as he wrote in “Esthetique du Mal”, a long poem featured in the collection.

Yet Stevens’s mind was not merely expansive, but a universe unto itself. As he described in “Tea at the Palaz of Hoon”:

I was the world in which I walked, and what I saw
Or heard or felt came not but from myself;
And there I found myself more truly and more strange.

Even when he tries his hand at spare minimalist stanzas, for instance in his often anthologised “Thirteen Ways of Looking at Blackbird” (a poem whose depths a critic could surely plumb for obscure biographical references if so inclined), Stevens is simply unable to suppress his lyrical musings on whether to prefer:

The beauty of inflections
Or the beauty of innuendos.
The blackbird whistling
Or just after.

More than any other American poet, Stevens became a visionary, a status
that Arthur Rimbaud–that great adventurer and mediocre poet–rightly
claimed was the goal of writing verse. In “Lettre du Voyant”, Rimbaud wrote that poetry, through a poet’s “long and systematic derangement of the senses”, could change ordinary reality into something extraordinary, a “factory into a mosque”. For Stevens, too, a poet’s “choice of the commodious adjective” could reveal the divine qualities of the objects that make up “grim reality”. This is because it is the poet’s “description that makes it divinity”, even when the reality may be nothing more than “An Ordinary Evening in New Haven.”

“Selected Poems” (Alfred A. Knopf) by Wallace Stevens, edited by John N. Serio, out now

From:

via WALLACE STEVENS, ARMCHAIR VISIONARY | More Intelligent Life.

Tweet This Post