A Tribute to Lynley Dodd

My baby likes to ride buses.

The baby from Spain likes to dance in the rain,
but my baby likes to ride buses.

The baby in Texas likes to drive a Lexus,
the baby from Spain will dance in the rain,
and my baby rides in buses.

The baby from Turkey likes having high tea,
the baby in Texas drives a Lexus,
the baby from Spain will dance in the rain,
yet my baby rides in buses.

The baby from Niger likes riding a tiger,
the baby from Turkey has a thing for high tea,
the baby in Texas drives a Lexus,
the baby from Spain will dance in the rain:
still! my baby rides in buses.

 

In other words, this blog is being repurposed into a parenting journal, because that's the big thing I'm doing this year.  Love to all.

Commonplace Book

A Martian Sends A Postcard Home
Caxtons are mechanical birds with many wings
and some are treasured for their markings -

they cause the eyes to melt
or the body to shriek without pain.

I have never seen one fly, but
sometimes they perch on the hand.

Mist is when the sky is tired of flight
and rests its soft machine on ground:

then the world is dim and bookish
like engravings under tissue paper.

Rain is when the earth is television.
It has the property of making colours darker.

Model T is a room with the lock inside -
a key is turned to free the world

for movement, so quick there is a film
to watch for anything missed.

But time is tied to the wrist
or kept in a box, ticking with impatience.

In homes, a haunted apparatus sleeps,
that snores when you pick it up.

If the ghost cries, they carry it
to their lips and soothe it to sleep

with sounds. And yet they wake it up
deliberately, by tickling with a finger.

Only the young are allowed to suffer
openly. Adults go to a punishment room

with water but nothing to eat.
They lock the door and suffer the noises

alone. No one is exempt
and everyone's pain has a different smell.

At night when all the colours die,
they hide in pairs

and read about themselves -
in colour, with their eyelids shut.

-- Craig Raine
(http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/131.html)

For Lucy, who asks good questions.

Yet more poetry...

Because if people are going to have interesting conversations in comments to your posts, you might as well memorialise it. :-)

Psyche to Eros

Do you think of me then, waiting on the rock?
It was cold – the wind bellied my red mantle, embroidered
with suns and wheels and dandelions. Their
warmth was only pictures; my bare feet bled
on the ragged stones. From the dark hills cold glints
of trumpets bid farewell: they were leaving me, though
my mother had clung like lichen clings, had wept
like water gushing from blank granite.
A beautiful sacrifice, I.

In this dark place – all softness, as a scrap
of thistle-down, as the fluff
of a wild-cat nursing kits – my eyes
are shut with your kisses, your murmuring
willow-voice all I hear. I drink you,
as night drinks blindness from a bowl.

Ah, love,
I dreamed that I married a falcon,
and slept in his feather-soft nest in the cliff
but I looked in his eyes,
sun-yellow,
and knowing me, he fled.

I might travel the hills to find that bird,
and cut my feet on the rocks,
and wear the wind for a mantle.
Until I see you,
you will never know.
--Cat Pegg

Commonplace Book

liberal
Consider this:
      A man who feels for the people.
      A friend to the ill-favoured.
      Never a word against the bar-
barians assuming Roman dress.

Reconcile this:
      A believer in man's potential.
      A voice raised against the games
      where human flesh is sport.
A man whose eyes fill at music.

You might at least concede:
      No man went hungry from my door.
      No woman was molested.
      No child was imposed on.
Humanitas inevitable as breath.

I who might have, have
      never raped, pillaged, extorted;
      abused office or position;
      concealed; interfered with art;
stood between any man and sunset.

And yet as you say,
      I have killed a god. I have made
      of impartiality, a farce.
      I have dabbled in chaos. I,
Pilate. Who vote as you do.
-- Vincent O'Sullivan

Vincent O'Sullivan, in An Anthology of New Zealand Poetry in English, (eds. Jenny Bornholdt, Gregory Brian, Mark Williams), (South Melbourne: Oxford University Press, 1997), p228.

Because I Was Asked To Inflict Poetry...

Gilgamesh
There was a young king from Uruk
Whom Enkidu thought was a pillock
They fought a great war
And broke down a door
Then made mighty love on a hillock.
-- Cat Pegg

(Er, I think Catherine wrote it. She's certainly the person who told it to me...)

My Eyes Are Covered With A Double Night...

Catullus #51

That man is equal to God,
or so it seems,
to me.

He even, may I say it,
exceeds divinity, for he sits
near you, again and again,
he sees you and he hears
you laughing sweetly.

All my senses have escaped,
they flee my misery, for
as soon as I have seen you, my Lesbia,
no voice is left to me.

Words numb my mouth,
creeping flames seize my weak limbs,
my ears ring with their own sound.

Oh Lesbia. My eyes are covered with a double night.

(Procrastinate? Who, me?)

The Parrot Poem

Because it's after midnight and I can't sleep. And it's funny.

"Alas, the Parrot"
The Parrot, imitator bird from the Indies of the East, has died.
     Go in throngs to his funeral, birds, go in throngs;
Go, pious winged ones, beat your breasts with feathered limb,
     go, and tear your tender cheeks with rigid claw.

All you who balance your course in the liquid air,
     but you before others, friend turtledove, mourn.
He was full of the harmony of life to you
     and lasted to the long end, tenacious and faithful.

What use that faith of yours, what use that form of scattered colour,
     what use that ingenious voice of shifting sounds,
What use that you are given to please my girl?
     Unhappy glory of the birds, you surely now lie dead.

He died, that burbling ghost of the human voice,
     the Parrot, a gift given from the far edge of the world.
The seventh day came, with no hope of another and
     he shouted out his dying words: "Corinna, be well."

Ovid, Amores 2.6, abridged.

On Studying...

Study continues apace. I've now finished rereading Love's Labours Lost, and I'm starting on the "Song of Songs" from the Authorized Version of the Bible, which has steamy bits. For instance, from Chapter II:

9 My beloued is like a Roe, or a yong Hart: behold, he standeth behind our wall, he looketh foorth at the window, shewing himself through the lattesse.
10 My beloued spake, and said vnto me, Rise vp, my Loue, my faire one, and come away.
11 For loe, the winter is past, the raine is ouer, and gone.
12 The flowers appeare on the earth, the time of the singing of birds is come, and the voice of the turtle is heard in our land.
13 The fig tree putteth foorth her greene figs, and the vines with the tender grape giue a good smell. Arise, my loue, my faire one, and come away.
14 O my doue! that art in the clefts of the rocke, in the secret places of the staires: let me see thy countenance, let me heare thy voice, for sweet is thy voice, and thy countenance is comely.
15 Take vs the foxes, the litle foxes, that spoile the vines: for our vines haue tender grapes.
16 My beloued is mine, and I am his: he feedeth among the lillies.
17 Vntill the day breake, and the shadowes flee away: turne my beloued and be thou like a Roe, or a yong Hart, vpon the mountaines of Bether.

Reynolds (ed.), "Song of Songs", Authorized Version in ENGL224 Texts 2, Wellington: Victoria University of Wellington, 2006, p124.

More poetry

Yet Another Boring Poem About A Bird
So, there was I,
a stranger in the Auckland Zoo,
facing down an angry tui
who staunchly perched beneath
a green netted sky.

It's an over used cliche I know,
as hackneyed as a kowhai tree
blooming in its first flush of gold
or the soft purpled grey cat's down
of a magnolia bud, just sneaking out
for a quick smoke in the chilly
end of winter -
just casually saying Hi, as one does,
it's not that we knew each other that well,
but yet I merited a quick Gidday.

But back to that cliched tui
its white bib and flounce of black,
shone through with bluey purple
(purple again!) and back to me,
in the green and damp smell,
talking to the tui, and
that bird, on that day,
swearing.

--Stephanie Pegg, May 2006

(All this seems to be a natural outcome of reading a lot of poetry in class right now. If there's anyone out there who doesn't like reading poetry, well, I guess you can just stop reading my posts. ;->)

Yet Another Infliction Of Poetry...

Catullus No.13
O, come with old Catullus, that we may dine:
a loaf of bread, a flask of wine, you, a girl,
it will be Paradise!
So long as you bring some wine,
  and maybe a bit of bread,
  and definitely a girl,
  and you.
For your well-salted wit
you shall have all my love,
(though my pockets are home for spiders)
and a little something more elegant,
  or smelly, I should say -
for my latest girlfriend left a bottle of the
most stinkiferous, redolent, exotic attar
of roses that you ever did smell.
(You will beg the gods of love to make you
  All Nose.)

Heaven.
-- Stephanie Pegg, May 2006.

(Our class assignment for today was to rewrite one of Catullus' poems in the style of a poet that we liked. I started off with whatsisname Fitzgerald and the Rubaiyat and then got a tad distracted.)

((Today I've had a signing test worth 20% and handed in a 2000 word essay worth 33% and a language assignment worth 20%. So I'm feeling tired but accomplished. Yay!))

Poems R Us Ride Again

To Mr. John Wyndham,
This is the outer edge of space, you know.
Since first Maui paddled out here in his
brothers' best waka (that's canoe to you)
this has been the edge.

What do you think of us in our secure
isolation? A golden land, to which
your chrysalids may limp from Labrador?
Labrador! (Where the heck is that?)

Oh, sir, you stand at the still dead centre.
Time fleets us, also, and the spinning world
throws us ever outward to an unkenned
undiscovered shore.

When next you write a refuge, remember:
this is the outer edge of space.
-- Stephanie Pegg, May 2006

(This is the first draft. Critical comments are welcome.)

Commonplace Book

"We have loved the stars too fondly to be fearful of the night."

Reach me down my Tycho Brahe, -- I would know him when we meet,
When I share my later science, sitting humbly at his feet;
He may know the law of all things, yet be ignorant of how
We are working to completion, working on from then till now.

Pray, remember, that I leave you all my theory complete,
Lacking only certain data, for your adding as is meet;
And remember, men will scorn it, 'tis original and true,
And the obloquy of newness may fall bitterly on you.

But, my pupil, as my pupil you have learnt the worth of scorn;
You have laughed with me at pity, we have joyed to be forlorn;
What, for us, are all distractions of men's fellowship and smiles?
What, for us, the goddess Pleasure, with her meretricious wiles?

You may tell that German college that their honour comes too late.
But they must not waste repentance on the grizzly savant's fate;
Though my soul may set in darkness, it will rise in perfect light;
I have loved the stars too truly to be fearful of the night.

What, my boy, you are not weeping? You should save your eyes for sight;
You will need them, mine observer, yet for many another night.
I leave none but you, my pupil, unto whom my plans are known.
You "have none but me," you murmur, and I "leave you quite alone"?

Well then, kiss me, -- since my mother left her blessing on my brow,
There has been a something wanting in my nature until now;
I can dimly comprehend it, -- that I might have been more kind,
Might have cherished you more wisely, as the one I leave behind.

I "have never failed in kindness"? No, we lived too high for strife, --
Calmest coldness was the error which has crept into our life;
But your spirit is untainted, I can dedicate you still
To the service of our science: you will further it? you will!

There are certain calculations I should like to make with you,
To be sure that your deductions will be logical and true;
And remember, "Patience, Patience," is the watchword of a sage,
Not to-day nor yet to-morrow can complete a perfect age.

I have sworn, like Tycho Brahe, that a greater man may reap;
But if none should do my reaping, 'twill disturb me in my sleep.
So be careful and be faithful, though, like me, you leave no name;
See, my boy, that nothing turn you to the mere pursuit of fame.

I must say Good-bye, my pupil, for I cannot longer speak;
Draw the curtain back for Venus, ere my vision grows too weak:
It is strange the pearly planet should look red as fiery Mars, --
God will mercifully guide me on my way amongst the stars.
-- Sarah Williams

http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1773.html

Commonplace Book

I haven't posted anything lately, so here goes another random poem (selected for no particular reason other than I happen to like it.)

Raferty
I am Raferty the Poet
Full of hope and love
With eyes that have no light
With gentleness that has no misery

Going west upon my pilgramage
By the light of my heart
Feeble and tired
To the end of the world

Behold me now
And my face to the wall
A-playing music
Unto empty pockets
--Raferty (trans. Douglas Hyde)

http://www.bartleby.com/250/142.html

Commonplace Book

Big whorls have little whorls
   That feed on their velocity,
And little whorls have lesser whorls
   And so on to viscosity.
-- Lewis F. Richardson

This was Richardson's summary of his 1920 paper "The supply of energy from and to Atmospheric Eddies" and can be found here, along with the two poems it's parodying. Gotta love physicists with a sense of humour.

In other news, our frisbee game last night was a draw. Go us!
(It's one of the more endearing traits of Ultimate Frisbee that there are no referees, but it does mean that sometimes people's idea of the score at the end of the game can be a little bit hazy. This time round, it turned out that both teams had thought that the other team was winning, so we compromised on a 12-12 split.) Also, one of the opposing team members said something nice to me about my playing at the end of the game, which still has me smiling. After the game our team decamped to my house for an evening of sausages, chips and conversation. It was a pretty good night.

Because I Haven't Inflicted Poetry On Anyone For Ages...

Or at least a week. :-)

"Ode to the Lemon"

From blossoms
released
by the moonlight,
from an
aroma of exasperated
love,
steeped in fragrance,
yellowness
drifted from the lemon tree,
and from its planetarium
lemons descended to the earth.

Tender yield!
The coasts,
the markets glowed
with light, with
unrefined gold;
we opened
two halves
of a miracle,
congealed acid
trickled
from the hemispheres
of a star,
the most intense liqueur
of nature,
unique, vivid,
concentrated,
born of the cool, fresh
lemon,
of its fragrant house,
its acid, secret symmetry.

Knives
sliced a small
cathedral
in the lemon,
the concealed apse, opened,
revealed acid stained glass,
drops
oozed topaz,
altars,
cool architecture.

So, when you hold
the hemisphere
of a cut lemon
above your plate,
you spill
a universe of gold,
a
yellow goblet
of miracles,
a fragrant nipple
of the earth's breast,
a ray of light that was made fruit,
the minute fire of a planet.

-- Pablo Neruda

(Courtesy of the Wondering Minstrels again: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/1702.html)

Commonplace Book

In honour of Neil Gaiman's very entertaining blog, most recently entitled The Return of The Devil's Foot, an oldie but a goodie:

Song
Go and catch a falling star,
Get with child a mandrake root,
Tell me where all past years are,
Or who cleft the devils foot;
Teach me to hear mermaids singing,
Or to keep off envy's stinging,
    And find
    What wind
Serves to advance an honest mind.

If thou be'st born to strange sights,
Things invisible to see,
Ride ten thousand days and nights
Till Age snow white hairs on thee;
Thou, when thou return'st wilt tell me
All strange wonders that befell thee,
    And swear
    No where
Lives a woman true and fair.

If thou find'st one let me know;
Such a pilgrimage were sweet.
Yet do not; I would not go,
Though at next door we might meet.
Though she were true when you met her,
And last, till you write your letter,
    Yet she
    Will be
False, ere I come, to two or three.
    -- John Donne

Used to good effect in Howl's Moving Castle by Dianna Wynne Jones, although it was, alas, left out of the recent movie.
(Courtesy of Wondering Minstrels: http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/minstrels/poems/384.html)

Commonplace Book...

I just read a poem that Dorothy Sayers wrote about being thankful which I rather liked. (This was written early on in WWII when a lot of material goods were becoming scarce.)

I need not shiver in silk stockings; -
I had a hunch about wool before it was rationed;
Now I have knitted myself woollen stockings
That come a long way up.
They are warm and admirable,
They do not ladder or go into holes suddenly.
I can boast quietly about them
And smirk while others admire my industry;
As it happens, I like knitting
And nothing gratifies one more
Than to be admired for doing what one likes.
-- Dorothy L. Sayers

(Hannay, Margaret P. (ed.), As Her Whimsey Took Her: Critical Essays on the Work of Dorothy L. Sayers, Kent: The Kent State University Press, pp211-2)

In Which I Talk About My Cat...

Because Catherine is sick of me talking about poetry. Actually, it's poetry that I really want to talk about, so this is an attempt to sneak under her radar.

I've been thinking lately that the modern popular conception of poetry is of something that's either difficult and hard to understand for 'posh people' with intellectual pretensions or something that's fun, rhymes and is meant for kids. As a couple of examples, I present for your edification a bona fide 'literary' poem that won awards called "Dismemberment: when in the dark" by Kapka Kassabova and a fun, happy kid's poem called "Recipe for a Hippopotamus Sandwich" by Shel Silverstein, both chosen for the arbitrary reason that I happen to like them.

There are some really obvious differences here. While neither has a fixed verse form, the Silverstein has a very obvious meter and makes heavy use of rhyme. It's designed to rollick through from beginning to end and practically begs to be read out loud. Kassbova's piece has very few rhymes at all, and they're mostly from word repetition. There are some repeated consonantal sounds, but they're mostly internal and subtle, for instance the repeating S sound in "When the moon comes it displays / your passing shadow - a stooped loneliness" which, really, you have to look for to notice. Moreover, the word order seems designed to emphasise the pauses between sentences and separate lines. To me, it seems that Kassabova, like many modern poets, really likes using such artificial silences to highlight what she sees as key points, and like many poems it gives the finished article a fractured quality. "Dismemberment: when in the dark" requires an effort to read and come to grips with. There's more emphasis on making the reader figure out what's meant rather than simply enjoying words that sound good.

To me, this seems to be an obvious result in the changing forms and uses of poetry. We are no longer in an age where an evening's entertainment would be for someone to belt out Alfred, Lord Tennyson's "The Charge of the Light Brigade", and looking at "The Charge", it has much more in common with Silverstein's poem in terms of meter, rhyme, repetition and other aural devices than Kassabova's piece. Kassabova was writing for a different audience, one that would read the poem silently in magazines and slim books of poetry. While it might occasionally be recited out loud at a public poetry reading, most people will encounter the poem only visually. Silverstein, on the other hand, is still writing for an aural audience - children who will be read to by their parents and teachers.

All this, of course, will be obvious to my discerning readers. Yet, I ask this: Where is the poetry for people who are neither children nor literati? Are they to be doomed to an arid wasteland of sports results and knitting patterns? Actually, this was a rhetorical question, because I already know the answer. Most (Western) people listen to poetry most days, it's just in hiding. To introduce the fourth example of this essay, "Take On Me" by A-ha (very popular when I was 8, by the way) has extremely simple lyrics which go right back into the tradition of making the words sound good. There's a very repetitive and simple rhyme scheme - lots of 'ay' sounds like "Okay", "anyway", "say", "play". The chorus is repeated very often as well, a trick that Tennyson and numerous other pre-20th century poets utilised heavily. The Carpe Diem theme has been used in poetry going back over two thousand years. As simple as it is, this poem links into a very old tradition of oral poetry, the main differences I can see are that the meter isn't very obvious and the phrases are very short. These seem reasonable compromises for words that are only one component of a song - the melody will buttress the words and provide its own timing, so it isn't as necessary for the word order to supply it, secondly, the vocal component of the song is just another instrument, a casual listener might not catch all of the words so keeping the phrases short helps their understanding. As another more recent example, "Travelin' Soldier" by the Dixie Chicks is packed full of alliterative and assonant/rhyme sounds, for instance "Too young for him they told her/Waitin’ for the love of a travelin’ soldier" and "piccolo player". The meter supplied from the words themselves is also entirely secondary to that provided by the martial drum beat that is played with the song. As far as I can tell, most song lyrics share similar qualities - like pre-20th century poetry the main emphasis is on sound, not how the lyrics work on the page, and the lyrics are provided as part of an ensemble - an important component but not the only one.

What's my point? The lyrics of pop songs are the poetry of the people. I have a sneaking suspicion that a lot of the song writers in bands don't really consider themselves to be poets, but that's what they are. Next time you're singing along to the radio, spare a thought for your favourite poet and give them a cheer.

**************************************

Oh, where's the bit about my cat? Through a series of strange events, a small plastic bag of catnip ended up on my bed instead of safely out of the way on a shelf where she can't get at it. I walked into my room to find her lolling on my bed, purring fit to burst and absolutely covered in the stuff. So is my bed (covered with catnip, I mean). Babe has a drug problem. (sob) What did I do wrong?

Commonplace Book

Dismemberment: when in the dark
There is a continent of your memory, somewhere,
carried by the frivolous tide
of everything that isn't you.
Each morning, you welcome the low tide.
You welcome each sun
that blinds you away from that continent.

But when the storm comes, you remember:
nothing is really quiet.
When the earthquake comes
cracks appear in your mental furniture.
When the moon comes it displays
your passing shadow - a stooped loneliness
so much taller than you.
And yet you're not moving. No, you're not moving.

In the dark, you listen to the world shed its silences
and dream of bruising yourself
against a body, or a sharpened soul
to break like an ice-pick that continent.

When in the dark somebody comes
the continent will float away, dismembered.

And you too will wake up on a breakaway piece,
alone and naked.
When in the dark somebody comes.

-- Kapka Kassabova, dismemberment, Auckland: Auckland University Press, 1998.

Poems R Us - Take Three

Who Weeps, Who Weeps For Adonis?

Who weeps for the lion, whose golden curls tumble
To the ground? He is most fine and bound in rough hemp, he’s tied
To a table of stone, and will lie,
Death-quiet, through a dark night,
Beneath the stars.

Who weeps for Dumuzi on a throne of gold? Cast down
Into dust, the death of brightness,
He's dragged into the dark
For his wife.

Who weeps for Adonis whose ivory skin is sprawled and tainted
By a boar’s tusk? His purple lips and sunken eyes
Will make no kisses now.

Who weeps for the burning boy, staggering back
With a piece of mistletoe in his eye?

Who weeps? Who weeps for a beautiful youth, fallen
To the outraged shout of a gunshot?
Blood seeps into cracks in concrete
To nourish the mosses, like urine;
His waste, his discards, boxed up and planted
In a tidy garden, somewhere,
With a carved stone on it.

Who weeps for the man who trembles with cold?
Hunched and shivering, back to a dried up pine tree,
He's the sacrifice of a pig hunt gone wrong;
His blood soaks into parched ground,
Down to a red salt sea.
That pale youth has a new name:
Corpse-rot, worm-food; he’s swallowed up in earth now,
His body hung by Herself on a nail on the wall,
Gone into dust.

Have we paid teind enough?
Lord?

-- Stephanie Pegg, November 2005

*********************************
This is one of those highly referential jobs that are lots of fun to write, but are hard to understand by anyone who hasn't read exactly the same books as the poet. I'm not sorry, but I'll understand if my vict- er, readers don't really get this.

I wrote the first draft when I was studying for an exam on Classical Traditions in English Literature and had been fairly well steeped in the Venus and Adonis myth. So that's where it comes from, as much as anything else.

Cheers all,

Stephanie