RosieBell

World War I

As the Team's Head-Brass

As the team's head-brass flashed out on the turn
The lovers disappeared into the wood.
I sat among the boughs of the fallen elm
That strewed the angle of the fallow, and
Watched the plough narrowing a yellow square
Of charlock. Every time the horses turned
Instead of treading me down, the ploughman leaned
Upon the handles to say or ask a word,
About the weather, next about the war.
Scraping the share he faced towards the wood,
And screwed along the furrow till the brass flashed
Once more.

The blizzard felled the elm whose crest
I sat in, by a woodpecker's round hole,
The ploughman said. 'When will they take it away? '
'When the war's over.' So the talk began –
One minute and an interval of ten,
A minute more and the same interval.
'Have you been out? ' 'No.' 'And don't want to, perhaps? '
'If I could only come back again, I should.
I could spare an arm, I shouldn't want to lose
A leg. If I should lose my head, why, so,
I should want nothing more...Have many gone
From here? ' 'Yes.' 'Many lost? ' 'Yes, a good few.
Only two teams work on the farm this year.
One of my mates is dead. The second day
In France they killed him. It was back in March,
The very night of the blizzard, too. Now if
He had stayed here we should have moved the tree.'
'And I should not have sat here. Everything
Would have been different. For it would have been
Another world.' 'Ay, and a better, though
If we could see all all might seem good.' Then
The lovers came out of the wood again:
The horses started and for the last time
I watched the clods crumble and topple over
After the ploughshare and the stumbling team.

Edward Thomas

In Memoriam (Easter, 1915)

The flowers left thick at nightfall in the wood
This Eastertide call into mind the men,
Now far from home, who, with their sweethearts, should
Have gathered them and will do never again.

Edward Thomas

Waiting for the Fascists

What a lot there has been about the turning of Tommy Robinson, once leader of the EDL. 

I don't want to make light of the fear the EDL inspired in Asian shopkeepers who were victims of their haphazard campaign against Islamic extremism, but I always thought they were a feeble lot compared to the real horrible Eurofascists like Jobbik in Hungary and Golden Dawn in Greece.  Not even Fascists in fact, a bunch of thuggish nationalists with a football hooligan element.

It is to the credit of the UK that (a) it has a history of being very poor at producing full blown Fascist movements and (b) that the stated aims of the EDL were not Fascist but a kind cultural conservatism, of a very British kind, that is, an invented one, like investing the Prince of Wales or Victorian Christmases.  The EDL were of course outraged at the lack of respect and patriotism shown by the poppy-burning Islamists,  but also at their antisemitism, homophobia and sex inequality - and getting upset at the last three is a fairly recent invention - post 70s I'd say.

They were bigged up a good deal by the activist class, who you could see got a real charge at having something that was tangibly fascist-like to confront. I remember when their Scottish equivalent, the SDL, were supposed to march in Edinburgh.  The SWP and other groups turned out.  There was a rally in Princes Street Gardens.  As it happened, the police bundled the 40 or so of them into a pub and sent them off, and the activist websites were buzzing with their overwhelming victory. 

I found myself nodding along with an article in Spike by Patrick Hayes:-

The EDL has been a spent political force for a couple of years. In 2011, when it was at its peak, it could get together several thousand people for its demos; today, it is hard pushed to reach triple digits. In fact, you’ll find fewer EDL supporters than police officers on a typical EDL demo today, the police’s primary role being to keep the EDL away from the ranks of anti-fascist protesters that trail around after the EDL like aggressive groupies. The EDL doesn’t even have any real membership base to speak of, often referring to the number of ‘Likes’ on its Facebook page as evidence of its alleged popularity

. . .

Robinson’s sudden self-rebranding as a moderate has been as much of a shock to anti-fascist protesters as it has been to his loyal ‘soldiers’ in the EDL. Having spent the past couple of years waving banners comparing Robinson to Norwegian mass murderer Anders Behring Breivik – ‘different face, same evil’ – anti-fascist commentators are now absurdly claiming that Robinson’s latest move is part of a fascist conspiracy to gain mainstream acceptance. . .

. . .it seems the people who would be most upset if ‘Nazi’ street groups such as the EDL disappeared are the activists, community workers and professional politicians who make a living or gain a sense of moral purpose from ostentatiously standing against such ‘fascism in our midst’. They wildly talk up the EDL’s threat because without the EDL their own political lives would become meaningless.

Cavafy's famous poem Waiting for the Barbarians, comes to mind.  I have updated for contemporary relevance:-

What are we waiting for, assembled in the streets?
 
            The Fascists are due here today.
 
 Why are we tense and bracing ourselves?
Why is everyone hiding stones and bottles?
 
            Because the Fascists are coming today.
            What else can we do but resist them?
            Once the Fascists are here, then we'll start the struggle.
 
 Why are they there, the newspaper sellers?
Just now, when no-one reads newspapers?
Crying, Smash Capitalism, Smash Fascism!
 
            Because the Fascists are coming today
            and this is a time for them to recruit.
            It's known that when the Fascists come
            You can sign up so many supporters.
 
Why have they come out, those speakers?
Crying Islamophobia and anti-imperialist?
Why do they shout, it's Cable Street again
Why the raised clenched fists, the No Pasarans?
 
            Because the Fascists are coming today
            and things like that frighten the Fascists.
 
Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?
(How serious people’s faces have become.)
Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,
everyone going home so lost in thought?
 
            Because night has fallen and the Fascists have not come.
            They are on Facebook and watching X-Factor,
            they are in the pubs cheering football on Sky.
 
 And now, what’s going to happen to us without the Fascists?
They were, those people, a kind of solution.

Words rule

It's Edinburgh Festival time, and we know it because the buses take 45 minutes to go along Princes Street (1 mile), the locals moan "bloody Festival" but still go in masses to the shows and the population, now increased 10% by actors, acrobats and dancers, is noticeably better looking, better dressed and in better shape.  As usual, everyone complains that the Fringe has gone corporate and expensive, it costs £10,000 to put on a show in a reasonable venue but then people come back with stories of going to a genuine Fringe show in a makeshift venue because their mate had a part, and what a bad experience that was.

So far I have been to one show, in the true and original spirit of the Fringe. That is, it was very good, and in a venue not really fit for purpose, The  Banshee Labyrinth. 

This was Jem Rolls' show. Jem is a performance poet and a livewire who set up a successful slam show in Edinburgh called Big Word.  He's been away from Edinburgh doing well on the Canadian festival circuit and it's great to see him back.

The difference between performance poetry and just spouting poetry? Well, that's like the difference between song lyrics and poetry - it's blurred but it exists. Performance poetry or, more accurately, spoken word, shades into stand up, into story telling, into doggerel, into James Joycean word play, into haranguing.  Jem's delivery is pent up utterance pouring out and his material is anecdote, observation, fantasy (eg birds remembering when they were dinosaurs). He can do a clever piece of virtuosity where every 2 lines are spoonerisms.  Two blokes go on a bad night out:-

so, amongst the movers and shakers
the shovers and makers
the chewed up and spat out
the spewed up and shat out
for the boozer he oozed breezily
and winless?
he bruised easily
for he had a dream upon a
prima donna
and went for the pretty girl
who looked slightly nutty
while the boozer he went for
the gritty pearl
who he said was nightly slutty

This piece is enjoyable performed but its cleverness can really only be admired on the page. (Full text here).


 

Jem Rolls on being ephemeral

Spoken word/performance poetry makes a virtue of the fact that it is ephemeral, like a gig or  a happening rather than a poem on paper. Most of Jem's pieces do work best performed, but a new one of his I wanted to read as a description of writing. This is called The World’s First Backstage Poem. The premise is that there are backstage musicals, i.e. where the musical is about people putting on a musical, and this is a poem about writing a poem. Anyone who writes beyond practical ends will know how the words will not do what you want to do but start pushing you somewhere else, like a kayak in an out-going tide.

....
Because
BEING A POET IS TOUGH!!! ...
when its hard to find a word you can trust
they fray at the edges
they blur
they arrive with all manner of baggage
and then they change their costume
 
And if one word alone is a bit of a handful
then when there’s a few of them
it quickly gets to be a nightmare
they gang up against you and start to
do their own thing
its like The Lord Of The Flies in there
and I’m hiding in the jungle from my own poem
 
Or they sashay into the
far reaches of
high pretension like an
existential French movie...
and come back to haunt you like
the Bastard Sons of the Mongol Bleedin’ Horde
and it’s like all the bits they’ll cut from the
next Tarantino because they’ll be
 too violent
. .. .

Or they get an overly high opinion of themselves
and start claiming descent from the Latin or the Greek
and start adding extra syllables just to be poncy
Luck stands up one day and pronounces
from now on you can call me Serendipity
Complicated gets all Social Realist and says from now on its TOUGH
 
Then you come in one awful day to find they’ve got all
purist and earnest and Hemingway
and they’ve thrown out all the adjectives
who picket me
aggressively
malevolently and
gargantuanly
on the way in
 
...
And you know that in German the nouns are capitalized?
well my nouns suddenly do
because I was just saying
Go out there and do your best nouning…
When they say
German nouns are capitalized
why aren’t we?
We demand capitalization
…
But the verbs
are the verbs having it?
no?
they say
We are the words of action
We are the workers
Down with the capitalist nouns
Verbs of the world unite and march to the front of the sentence

That is Jem - who is clever, witty, fantastical and brilliant in performance.

He's on at the Banshee Labyrinth, 29-35 Niddry Street, EH1 1LG  up to 24th August at 08:40pm.. The show is free but he deserves a donation. He got a 4 star review in The Scotsman.

The Christmas Life

"If you don't have a real tree you don't bring the Christmas life into the house." Josephine Mackinnon, aged 8

Bring in a tree, a young Norwegian spruce,
Bring hyacinths that rooted in the cold.
Bring winter jasmine as its buds unfold -
Bring the Christmas life into this house.

Bring red and green and gold, bring things that shine,
Bring candlesticks and music, food and wine.
Bring in your memories of Christmas past.
Bring in your tears for all that you have lost.

Bring in the shepherd boy, the ox and ass,
Bring in the stillness of an icy night,
Bring in the birth, of hope and love and light.
Bring the Christmas life into this house.

Wendy Cope

Gig for Pussy Riot

Gig for Pussy Riot
Sunday 18th November 7pm
Parlour Bar, 142 Duke Street, Edinburgh.

A night of satire, spoken word, punk poetry and stand up comedy. With DJs.

Two spoken word sets from Kevin Williamson, Rodney Relax, Jess Hopkins, Stewart Hogg and Rachel McCrum, Maze McPunklet, Rosie Bell, Rebecca Mason.

Music and comedy from Tommy Reckless McKay, Liz Cronin, Frank Discussion and Robert Murphy.

Compered by Andy 'Mad Dog' McFarlane.

Free gig. 10% of bar donated to the Pussy Riot Defence fund.

Parlour Bar is a really nice pub with a good vibe.

Lovers Whose Bodies Smell of Each Other

Valerie Eliot died on 9th November. She was T S Eliot's second wife.  His first marriage to the unhappy and disturbed Vivienne Haigh-Wood was wretched.  

"To her, the marriage brought no happiness. To me, it brought the state of mind out of which came The Waste Land."

 "My nerves are bad tonight. Yes, bad. Stay with me.
"Speak to me. Why do you never speak. Speak.
  "What are you thinking of? What thinking? What?
"I never know what you are thinking. Think."

     I think we are in rats' alley
Where the dead men lost their bones.

"What is that noise?"
                    The wind under the door.
"What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?"
                                    Nothing again nothing.
                                                                       "Do
"You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
"Nothing?"

The Wasteland

He married Valerie, his secretary, when he was sixty-eight and she was thirty.  He dedicated his only tender love poem to her.

A Dedication to My Wife

To whom I owe the leaping delight
That quickens my senses in our wakingtime
And the rhythm that governs the repose of our sleepingtime,
          The breathing in unison

Of lovers whose bodies smell of each other
Who think the same thoughts without need of speech
And babble the same speech without need of meaning.

No peevish winter wind shall chill
No sullen tropic sun shall wither
The roses in the rose-garden which is ours and ours only

But this dedication is for others to read:
These are private words addressed to you in public.

I googled for a copy to paste and found it on a site of readings for weddings.  The arcane modernist wrote a poem that anyone who has been in love can understand.

(A piece about the disappearing breed of literary widows here.)

Generations

I had almost finished this poem for ANZAC day.  I'm now posting it for Remembrance Day.  It's based on something my brother-in-law, John Lyall, told me about his family.

Generations

(for my brother-in-law, John Lyall)

From Australia, my mother made a call.
"What are you doing? "Nothing much at all."
 
"I remembered young Dave Lyall today,
Your great uncle, killed at Suvla Bay.
 
At seventeen," And that was young to me,.
David Lyall, left in Gallipoli.
 
And my grandfather, who was crippled from,
A bullet in the neck got at the Somme.
 
We cleared my mother's house and found his pack,
The unit number stencilled on the back.
 
The empires spilled and caused a mighty stain.

This cafe is encased by Auckland's rain.

I think of that old war, and it's so sad,
And long ago.  I tap my phone.  "Hi, Dad!"
 
"Whatcha doing?" Nothing much. Work and fun"
No khakied man taught us to fire a gun.
 
I talk to David Lyall, Davo, my son.

Satin and Gold - National Poetry Day

I read this as a teenager and can still quote it verbatim:-

Escapist's Song - Theodore Spencer

The first woman I loved, he said,
Her skin was satin and gold.

The next woman I loved, he said.
Her skin was satin and gold.

The third woman I loved, he said,
Was made in a different mold.

She was deeper than me, and said so;
She was stronger than me, and said so.

She was wiser than me, and proved it;
I shivered, and grew cold.

The fourth woman I loved, he said,
Her skin was satin and gold.

 

Poems in the Pub

Poems in the Pub is on Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday, 6pm - 7pm

I'm performing on Tuesday August 21st

Captain's Bar
4 South College Street
Edinburgh
EH8 9AA

Occasionally Wrong

Carol Ann Duffy does rise to her job as Poet Laureate by turning out occasional  poems, though she doesn't always rise to the occasion.  In her poem for the Olympics she sank like a Lib Dem poll; like Tony Blair's credibility; like the brotherly love in the Coalition - insert your own political metaphor. 

Enough of the soundbite abstract nouns,
austerity, policy, legacy, of tightening metaphorical belts;
we got on our real bikes,
for we are Bradley Wiggins,
               side-burned, Mod, god;
we are Sir Chris Hoy,
Laura Trott, Victoria Pendleton, Kenny, Hindes,
Clancy, Burke, Kennaugh and Geraint Thomas,
               Olympian names.

We want more cycle lanes.

               Or we saddled our steed,
or we paddled our own canoe,
or we rowed in an eight or a four or a two;
our names, Glover and Stanning; Baillie and Stott;
Adlington, Ainslie, Wilson, Murray,
               Valegro (Dujardin's horse).

(No we aren't and we didn't.  Speak for yourself.  "We" mostly sat on the sofa.)

She has received a lot of derision for it , and nowhere more than at That Place, where some commenters complained that Betjeman would have done it better, and inquired how would Larkin have done it? 

"Lamia" produced this fine pastiche, which caught the Larkin mood (glass three quarters empty and a fly drowning in the remaining liquid).

Prize-giving MMXII

by Philip Larkin

With a stern blazered smile the judge draws near,
Headmasterly, to where I loiter, bald
Bowing my head, and blinking behind my specs.
And then a velvet fumbling, a falling into place
As something heavy slithers round my neck
To hang in awkward gaudiness. A cheer,
And then the National Anthem strikes up gold.

Gold? Or something else? Stepping down slowly
From the podium to piss, I wonder
What it was all for. ‘Run for Team GB’
They said. But where does one run from here?
The crowds will quietly drift away,
The stadiums will crumble into pieces.
The asphalt lanes will gather weed and leaf.
This cycling Kraut, that weightlifting Bolivian,
That crew of sailing Japs, each year will sink
A little further into blank oblivion.

And poised between my thumb and finger
This cold token of autumnal grief.
In a bare wintry drawer it will linger,
for a while, gathering dust, unsold,
Among dead stamps and a leaflet about wine.
An old wives' charm to ward away new failure.
Something to please the nephews and the nieces.
Something to taunt those pricks in Australia.

In the Olympic bar I stand a drink
For a Danish woman and some ass from Spain.
The hot triumphant evening turns to thunder,
And somewhere out beyond the finish line
The first small medals of rain. Strange to think
We will never be so happy again.

The theme "Lamia" has taken. that no happiness endures, is in the tradition of Pindar, the poet who wrote poems to celebrate the victories of the original Olympic athletes.  Here are the last verses of his Ode to Aristomenes of Aegina, the winner of the boys' wrestling contest.  He speaks of the humiliation of the losers as well as the joy of the winners:-

Now from on high on four young bodies
You hurled your strength with fierce intent.  For them
No happy homecoming from Pytho was decreed,
As that of yours, nor at their mother's side
Could pleasant laughter ring a joyful greeting
For their return.  But shunning hostile eyes, they creep
By quiet paths, o'erwhelmed by their ill-fortune,

But he to whom is given new glory
In the rich sweetness of his youth, flies up,
Aloft, high hope fulfilled on wings of soaring valour,
In realms that brook no dullard cares of wealth,
But man's delight flowers but for a brief moment,
And no less swiftly falls to the ground again, shattered,
By destined will that may not be gainsaid.

Creatures of a day!  What is man?
What is he not? A dream of a shadow
Is our mortal being.  But when there comes to men
A gleam of splendour given of Heaven,
Then rests on them a light of glory
And blessed are their days.

(Translated by Geoffrey S Conway)

Duffy of course is entitled to write about the Government's economic policy with the fiercest anger - but a poem about the Olympics is not the best place to start, at least not in this tone - Yay Hoy! Boo Cameron! Inserting a local political message jars with the events and sounds ridiculous.  "Lamia" as Larkin and Pindar describe an event which becomes haloed with a universal theme.  

When Larkin did write an occasional poem it was for the opening of the Humber Bridge, which became part of a broader theme of isolation and joining. If he'd been in Duffy mode he would have added something about more money should be spent on cycle paths, and damned transport policy generally.

 

The winds play on it like a harp; the song,
Sharp from the east, sun-throated from the west,
Will never to one separate shire belong,
But north and south make union manifest.

Lost centuries of local lives that rose
And flowered to fall short where they began
Seem now to reassemble and unclose,
All resurrected in this single span,

 Reaching for the world, as our lives do,
As all lives do, reaching that we may give
The best of what we are and hold as true:
Always it is by bridges that we live.