Sunday 19th February - Book Club date creepeth closer

I shall send an email round the group; our next meeting is in 10 days or so and I need to circulate my suggestions;

Ghost Wall by Sarah Moss - creepy story of historical re-enacters rebuilding an ancient (stone age?) sacrificial construction and getting too involved in the rea-enacting

Ghost Music  by An Yu - bewildering story set in China as pianists life slowly unravels as she discovers more about her husband

Nightingale Wood by Stella Gibbons - much lighter, sharply observed and often hilarious story, about the difficulties for a young woman 'of a certain class' in finding a suitable husband, especially when you are completely financially dependent upon your parents

The Running Hare by John Lewis-Stempel - beautiful nature writing about creating a small traditional wheatfield

and my 'wild card';

I've never read 'The Four Quartets',  four longer poems by T S Eliot.  I wonder if anyone else in the club fancies having a go? I keep tripping across quotations that I have heard before 

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future

And time future contained in time past.

Do not let me hear
Of the wisdom of old men, but rather of their folly,
Their fear of fear and frenzy, their fear of possession,
Of belonging to another, or to others, or to God.
The only wisdom we can hope to acquire
Is the wisdom of humility: humility is endless

The river is within us, the sea is all about us

April is the cruellest month

and many more.

I've sent off for a secondhand copy. along some study notes to help ne along

Tuesday 27th July - Nearly everything on the list...

 I'm back to playing my Roland digital harpsichord again - it's probably been gathering dust for nearly a year, but what with one thing and another I haven't been playing the piano or anything much. Until I drastically cut down on the teaching back in March last year, I was hardly doing any playing in the evenings and weekends, although I usually did a ' piano project' over the Summer holidays.

this isn't me!

This Summer's project is to try and play some Bach - starting with the Partita in B flat and the Goldberg Variations. I'm not aiming for any great mastery of the Variations - but if I manage get hack my way through each one I shall be very pleased. I'm making more of an effort with the Partita. 

The drawing book - 'Learn to Draw in 30 Days or Less' - continues to astonish me! The last two lessons were on single point perspective - not something I've ever bothered too much about before.

Yesterday's was on how to draw a room;

and today's was drawing a street;

I'm up to lesson 23. Tomorrow I tackle 2-point perspective....

I just follow the instructions, and out pops a picture - how does that work?

Also  a painting - I saw some leaves against an evening sky for just a couple of second on television the other evening, so I did the background one day, the leaves the next, and today added some lines using a pen that has brown sparkly ink.

 The sparkles don't show up much...

The two knitted pot-holders went through the washing machine at 40 degrees as instructed at the end of the knitting pattern, and came out completely felted. The larger one is using the pattern, but I suspect that somewhere along the way things went astray because it is meant to be flat. I made a simplified version for the smaller one. They do look amazing - I shall make some more!

Finally, I am gradually typing up poems written by my grandmother when she was young - they are from around 1910 - 1920. The idea is to collect them into a booklet so that anyone in the family who is interested can have them. (I knew there was some purpose to learning to type at the beginning of this year!). There is a whole box full of her poems, memories, talks to the Mothers Union, stories...

At the moment I am working through an envelope labelled 'Youthful Poems'. At first I found the writing quite tricky, but I am beginning to 'get my eye in'.

Nearly everything on the list, I said - no hoovering, cleaning, tidying, you notice...

Tuesday 1st December - Advent calendars!

 This year I have got three, no, four advent 'calendars' on the go;

The little tea lights I 'made', as in wrapping them around with Christmas washi tape which I started yesterday, as there was one tea light left over from last year; (you will see some of the tea lights stacked ready to the side)

I discovered they burn for about 5 hours, so I try and light them around four or five in the early evening 

Today's also the day for starting the chocolate advent calendar (I am so looking forward to a chocolate after supper tonight) and the wooden Father Christmas calendar, now with all the little drawers miraculously stuffed full with different exotic teas;

Finally, or should I say initially, I began the Advent book 'Frequencies of God, using the poems of  RS Thomas poems. I read the first poem on Sunday 29th November as that was the first day of Advent. I'll leave you with today's poem; 

In Church by R. S. Thomas 

Often I try 

To analyse the quality 

Of its silences. 

Is this where God hides 

From my searching? 

I have stopped to listen, After the few people have gone,

 To the air recomposing itself 

For vigil. It has waited like this 

Since the stones grouped themselves about it. 

These are the hard ribs 

Of a body that our prayers have failed 

To animate. Shadows advance 

From their corners to take possession 

Of places the light held 

For an hour. The bats resume 

Their business. The uneasiness of the pews 

Ceases. There is no other sound 

In the darkness but the sound of a man 

Breathing, testing his faith On emptiness, nailing his questions 

One by one to an untenanted cross.

  

The lines that stayed with me were '...the air recomposing itself / For vigil. It has waited like this /Since the stones grouped themselves about it.'

That really gave me a sense of millenia...

(How does he know where to put the line breaks in?)

Update on my father - he is making steady progress, beginning to think about what everyday life might look like when he leaves hospital.

  

Tuesday 1st January 2020 - Poems for the New Year

How about this as a bracing poem to start the year?

SAY not the struggle naught availeth,
   The labour and the wounds are vain,
The enemy faints not, nor faileth,
   And as things have been they remain.

If hopes were dupes, fears may be liars;
   It may be, in yon smoke conceal'd,
Your comrades chase e'en now the fliers,
   And, but for you, possess the field.

For while the tired waves, vainly breaking,
   Seem here no painful inch to gain,
Far back, through creeks and inlets making,
   Comes silent, flooding in, the main.

And not by eastern windows only,
   When daylight comes, comes in the light;

In front the sun climbs slow, how slowly!
   But westward, look, the land is bright!

Arthur Hugh Clough

 It's a real 'never give up' rallying cry. If was the only poem of his I had ever read, (and up until a moment or two ago, it WAS the only poem of his I had ever read) I might have put him down as some kind of Victorian muscular Christian; then I read this, which sort of confirmed my opinion until I got to the second line;

The Latest Decalogue

Thou shalt have one God only; who
Would be at the expense of two?
No graven images may be
Worshipp'd, except the currency:
Swear not at all; for, for thy curse
Thine enemy is none the worse:
At church on Sunday to attend
Will serve to keep the world thy friend:
Honour thy parents; that is, all
From whom advancement may befall:
Thou shalt not kill; but need'st not strive
Officiously to keep alive:
Do not adultery commit;
Advantage rarely comes of it:
Thou shalt not steal; an empty feat,
When it's so lucrative to cheat:
Bear not false witness; let the lie
Have time on its own wings to fly:
Thou shalt not covet; but tradition
Approves all forms of competition.

I found more and more gems when I scrolled further through www.poemhunter.com - he does a good line in satire. 

There is a last verse;

The sum of all is, thou shalt love,
If anybody, God above:
At any rate shall never labour
More than yourself to love your neighbour.

Looking into his biography I find I was on the right track - he went to Rugby School when Arnold was the headmaster, revolutionising public school education and developing a 'manly, muscular Christianity. Clough was a star pupil - but at Balliol he lost his faith in amongst the turmoil of the Oxford Movement.

I'm going to enjoy reading more of his poems...

Meanwhile, Happy New Year to everyone; I'm sure any struggle will not naught availeth!

 

 

Monday 11th June - Sourdough loaves, Breadmakers, Haikus

This is just a random hurdy-gurdy of what's filling my brain at the moment;

Working backwards... (why not!)

Haikus

Last night, before I went to bed, I did some work on the "Making Poetry" free online course from www.futurelearn.com that I'm part way through.

So far I've dabbled with sestinas and villanelles, and now it was the turn of Haiku. They hadn't been heard of when I did English Lit at school (I don't remember that we did much in the way of poetry anyway!)

The current poetry task is to take two words to use are "prompts" and make a poem. The haiku is a terrible, terrible thing!

Haiku (or hokku) A Japanese verse form most often composed, in English versions, of three unrhymed lines of five, seven, and five syllables. A haiku often features an image, or a pair of images, meant to depict the essence of a specific moment in time.
https://www.poetryfoundation.org/learn/glossary-terms/haiku-or-hokku

Terrible, in that when you are lying awake at night, trying to get to sleep, to have your mind invaded by haiku-mania is a sure-fire way of staying awake for ever.

I find a haiku
is rather more difficult
than I thought at first.

"You'll be surprised",
they said in the instructions
"at what you'll achieve".

My head's full of words
in never-ending circles
that create nonsense.

Please, please, make it stop!
I'm desperate to be sleeping!
not counting the words.

and so forth.

At one point I started a villanelle


I'm lying awake
Turning words round in my head
Constructing haikus

words filling my mind
do not encourage slumber
I'm lying awake..

It's quite a puzzle
to choose the perfect phrase when
Constructing haikus

And a villanelle!
It's no wonder that I find
I'm lying awake.

The words I should use,
'Hope' and 'loom', won't flow when
constructing haikus.

criss cross threads of day, warp, weft
hope in my story's loom while
I'm lying awake
Constructing haikus

It's not great, but it will have to do!

Breadmaking Machines

I've just put this into today's blog as this is a link to making sourdough bread in the bread machine which looks promising. I thought if I posted it here there was a chance I might not lose it.

http://blog.rachelcotterill.com/2014/04/making-sourdough-in-bread-machine.html

Sour-Dough Loaves

I've rashly begun a second starter.

The first one comes from a book all about "healthy fermented foods". It (the starter, not the book) is made with rye flour and will take 14 days to be ready. It involves an awful lot of discarding most of what you have brewed up every couple of days while you are growing it.

The second one uses "all-purpose" flour - I'm hoping that white bread flour will do the trick, and came from here  This should be ready in five days and doesn't involve chucking most of it away, which is probably why they stipulate a 2 quart (? of, four pints. why didn't you say so) bowl.
I've hidden it at the back of the counter so maybe he won't notice it...

But then I read the recipe for making the actual bread. What a faff! Making puff pastry from scratch would be less tie consuming! The whole process takes several days of kneading and proving and shaping and proving and turning and rising...

which is why I started wondering about bread machine recipes. I'm not bothered about healthy or authentic - just let me have some home-made sour-dough bread!

All these sour-dough loaves
are needy, demanding and,
attention-seeking.

Saturday 24th February - Important News

(I know the day and date, because they've just told me on the 'Today' programme, on Radio 4. What a useful broadcast that is. However I've switched it off before they start annoying me with too many opinions and speculations. I know shouting at the 'Today' programme is part of my cultural identity but I didn't want to disturb the peace this morning)

The Really Important News is that I have just this moment discovered the sound recordings on www.thepoetryarchive.org

Radio 4 again. This is what we pay our license money for, and what makes it all worthwhile.

I was dipping into Clive James'  'Poetry Notebook' (too many ' ' marks in a row, but I don't know how to do that differently) and came to the chapter called

'Poetry Archive Tour'.

This is a list of poems, and his comments on the poetry, and how the poet reads them, BUT NOT THE TEXT. so, I reached for the gadgetry to find the text, and discovered www.poetryarchive.org

I've given the web address twice. For two reasons. So I don't forget, and to give you a chance to remember it.

So far I've listened to the first four poems in his 'tour' of the archive, and another along the way;

'Mayflies' by Richard Wilbur (which lead to by accident to the - to my mind - even more startling 'Barred Owl' - but who am I to disagree with Clive James?)

'The Whitsun Weddings' by Philip Larkin, which I encountered a few years ago; it reads like the outline plot for a novel or a short story. I'm tempted to have a go.

'A Subaltern's Love Song' by John Betjeman. Joan Hunter Dunn is how everyone knows it - rather charmingly JB can't find it in the book because he can't remember the real title. (Another ready-plotted novel?)

and then I listened to/read

'Jerusalem' by James Fenton, which needs a good deal more reading and thinking about before I go further.

Stone cries to stone,
Heart to heart, heart to stone,
.....
stop me here before I write out the whole poem. But the lines seem to fly off the page with the force of a video documentary or news photography. here come a few more snippets;
.....
this is the cistern where all wars begin
.....
Jerusalem itself is on the move.
It leaps and leaps from hill to hill
....
This is us and that is them,
This is Jerusalem.
These are the dying men with tattooed wrists.
Do this and I'll destroy your home.
I have destroyed your home. You have destroyed my home.

Now I shall go and do something useful about war, or religious intolerance, or poverty, or refugees, or something, anything, because Jerusalem is everywhere, leaping across boundaries, continents, seas...

Sunday 21st January 2018 - Poetry and Prose

Long time no write.

I've been plagued by general "under-the-weather-ness" since before Christmas. I've now discovered that I have probably been brewing a low grade infection since maybe October. I have regular blood tests to make sure that the various pills and potions I take aren't causing any problems... one of the things they check is my white blood cell count which has been slowly creeping up implying an infection. So I have been taking the antibiotics for a week now, and  I cancelled everything that could easily be cancelled on Thursday and Friday.

That means I have been spending quite a lot of time sitting around in bed, reading, or browsing on the internet, or dozing. The next couple of days are lighter than usual, so, hopefully, by the time I've finished the second box of antibiotics, whatever bugs had taken up residence will have been dealt with.

Meanwhile, I have discovered the poetry of U A Fanthorpe and Rainer Marie Rilke's 'Letters to a Young Poet'. And I'm trying to read 'A Far Cry From Kensington' by Muriel Spark but I can't continue past the first page until I have absorbed all its wonders.

I knew about U A Fanthorpe, in the sense that I had tripped across several of her popular poems and been very amused. Try the one about the damsel being rescued from the dragon which is about the picture at the top of this post. the picture.

But this poem, one, about the list of psychiatric patients for the next day's clinic is very poignant;

The List

Flawlessly typed, and spaced
At the proper intervals,
Serene and lordly, they pace
Along tomorrow’s list
Like giftbearers on a frieze.

In tranquil order, arrayed
With the basic human equipment -
A name, a time, a number -
They advance on the future.

Not more harmonious who pace
Holding a hawk, a fish, a jar
(The customary offerings),
Along the valley of the kings.

Tomorrow these names will turn nasty,
Senile, pregnant, late,
Handicapped, handcuffed, unhandy,
Muddled, moribund, mute,

Be stained by living. But here,
Orderly, equal, right,
On the edge of tomorrow, they pause
Like giftbearers on a frieze

With the proper offering,
A time, a number, a name.
I am the artist, the typist;
I did my best for them.

(from Side Effects, 1978)

And why can't I get past the first page of 'A Far Cry From Kensington'?

' ... I formed the habit of insomnia. Insomnia is not bad in itself. You can lie awake at night and think; the quality of insomnia depends entirely on what you decide to think of.  Can you decide to think?-Yes, you can. You can put your mind to anything most of the time....'

that needs some pondering before moving on. I still don't know anything about this person, except that she is talking about the past, and about now in the book.

Later on...  (I have managed to read a couple more pages!)

'.... if there's nothing wrong with you except fat, it is easy to get thin.Youbeat and drink the same as always , only half. If you are handed a plate of food, leave half; if you have to help yourself, take half...'

if only it were that easy. Oh, wait; she has advice on will power as well! Please excuse me from writing as I Need to Read!

Sunday 15th October - Poem

I've just read this in "The Spectator", written by AnthonyThwaites

Lines on my 87th birthday

Trees that I thought were dead are green again
Suddenly, and so late, miraculously,
Not blighted with ash die-back. What I see
Surprises with a rush of happiness
As if it were not necessary to die
But always be open to capriciousness.

Saturday 25th February - Persevere - It is worth it

This recent post by www.aclerkofoxford.blogspot.co.uk is spot on for today's news:

'Whan alle tresors arn tried,' quod she, 'Treuthe is the beste'

‘There I could see winged wonders fly’, by Warwick Goble (1912)

The Chaucerian English isn't that hard to scan through. Nothing like the tedium (sorry) of getting bogged down in Canterbury Tales at school when I was about thirteen. Although, I remember the astonishment of hearing the Prologue read out and discovering I could follow the story "just like that". It was  on a TV series of maybe thirty-five years ago, called "Six Centuries of Verse" - what! I've just googled it and found it as a DVD - made in 1984! That goes STRAIGHT onto my birthday wishlist!

Back to aclerkofoxford - go on, follow the link. Read it, right to the end. I quote

"It's about Chaucer's brilliant, dizzying, disturbing poem The House of Fame, and its vision of what we have recently started calling a 'post-truth' world - in which stories spread and circulate regardless of whether they are true or not."

I could now make a reference to the latest White House Hoo Ha about excluding some news agencies and publications from a press briefing. Or I could cut another slice of cake and drink my tea.

Autumn Poetry Challenge - "Hope is the thing with feathers"

I've been having a go at learning poetry by hearth this term. My original idea was for a poem a week, but that has proved impractical. Sometimes I change my mind about the poem and don't want to learn it, sometimes I run out of brain power, sometimes I forget.

This is one that has stayed with me:

It has a sweetness, a simplicity that appeals; I can imagine "Hope" as a feathered bird, small, but surprisingly tough and enduring. Like the small birds doing their annual migrations, back and forth, every year.

Wednesday 14th May - Rosebuds? - photograph

gather ye rosebuds whilst in May....    misquoting Herrick

To the Virgins, to Make Much of Time

Robert Herrick, 1591 - 1674

 

Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,
   Old Time is still a-flying;
And this same flower that smiles today
   Tomorrow will be dying.

The glorious lamp of heaven, the sun, 
   The higher he’s a-getting,
The sooner will his race be run,
   And nearer he’s to setting.

That age is best which is the first,
   When youth and blood are warmer;
But being spent, the worse, and worst
   Times still succeed the former. 

Then be not coy, but use your time,
   And while ye may, go marry;
For having lost but once your prime,
   You may forever tarry.

I

Sunday 10th November - MCMXIV

Here's a post I prepared earlier; a poem I came across last week and saved for today.

At this very moment I am listening to/watching a programme on BBC 4 on the history of the requiem. WeE have reached Brahms; very appropriate.

MCMXIV
Those long uneven lines
Standing as patiently
As if they were stretched outside
The Oval or Villa Park,
The crowns of hats, the sun
On moustached archaic faces
Grinning as if it were all
An August Bank Holiday lark;

And the shut shops, the bleached
Established names on the sunblinds,
The farthings and sovereigns,
And dark-clothed children at play
Called after kings and queens,
The tin advertisements
For cocoa and twist, and the pubs
Wide open all day--

And the countryside not caring:
The place names all hazed over
With flowering grasses, and fields
Shadowing Domesday lines
Under wheat's restless silence;
The differently-dressed servants
With tiny rooms in huge houses,
The dust behind limousines;

Never such innocence,
Never before or since,
As changed itself to past
Without a word--the men
Leaving the gardens tidy,
The thousands of marriages,
Lasting a little while longer:
Never such innocence again.
Philip Larkin (1922-1985)

Sunday 15th September - Real Poetry

I follow a number of blogs on various topics (using feedly.com. I used to use Google Reader to manage the blogs, but it has been discontinued which is a real shame)

One of the blogs is http://adiscounttickettoeverywhere.wordpress.com/ which is about books.

Yesterday's post caught my attention: http://adiscounttickettoeverywhere.wordpress.com/2013/09/13/on-finding-inspiration-in-the-unlikeliest-places-poetry-again/

about how "real poetry" should "get you where you live".

Anyway, the result of reading her post was that I downloaded "To Love and Be Wise" to my Kindle (I like a bit of Josephine Tey, and I discovered that I hadn't read this one) in order to follow up the comments on poety. (Oho - what a temptation a Kindle is! "One click" and the book is ready, waiting to be read...)

I enjoyed the book - I love the dated, period feel of this genre and period, and the snobbery and the class-consciousness - and I enjoyed the little conversation about poetry, and the poem itself:

Chief Inspector Grant, a sophisticated, educated man money and style and a palate for fine things (the palate gets mentioned more than is acceptable to my mind; that's what I mean by snobbery) quotes part of a poem about floods, and adds, 'Sadly old-fashioned. It sounds like poetry. A fatal defect, I understand.'

Here's the poem with the "fatal defect":
"Where once did wake and move
The slight and ardent grass,
Swift beauty come to pass
Has drowned the blades that strove.

O Final Beauty, found
In many a drowned place,
We love not less the face
For lesser beauties drowned."

Inspector Rodgers, a countryman, thinks about this, and offers another poem, adding

'.......It wasn't poetry, properly speaking, I mean it didn't rhyme, but it got me where I lived. It said:

"My lot is cast in inland places,
Far from sounding beach
And crying gull,
And I
Who knew the sea's voice from my babyhood
Must listen to a river purling
Through green fields,
And small birds gossiping
Among the leaves."

'Now you see, I was bred by the sea, over at Mere Harbour, and I've never got used to being away from it. You feel hedged in, suffocated. But I never found the words for it till I read that. I know exactly how that bloke felt. "Small birds gossiping!" '

Another view of the Arun
http://www.geograph.org.uk/photo/2609419
© Copyright Peter Trimming and licensed for reuse under this Creative Commons Licence

I assume Josephine Tey wrote both poems. She's right - the first poem "sounds" like poetry but isn't. Presumably she constructed it as an example of something that tries too hard and is all clunking rhyme and clockwork rhythm. And the two "drowned"s. No, seriously, not. "Overworked", as Paul Hollywood would say in "The Great British Bakeoff".




http://www.thekitchn.com/bread-baking-tip-how-to-tell-w-156772

The second poem is much more effective. It completely explains the difference between the sound of the water, and the sound of the birds, by river and by sea.

And yes, I did read the whole book all in one go. I had a cyclophosphamide dose on Friday, and it leaves me all feak and weeble for a day or so afterwards, and reading is really all I am fit for until I get over it. It was the last of the six doses; more lung function tests (huffing and puffing into a complicated looking machine which whirrs and clicks and produces brightly-coloured graphs on a computer screen) to follow at the end of October to see if the immune-suppressant drugs have been doing me any good.

Wednesday 7th August - Really Dire Poetry

There was an old man of Tralee
Who was stung on the knee by a wasp,
When they asked "did it hurt?"
He replied "not a bit,
"But I'm so glad it wasn't a hornet!"

There was an old man of Japan,
Whose limericks would never exactly scan.
There was also the line
That didn't quite rhyme,
So you'd best forget it as soon as you can.

I'm fiddling around with a bit of "Creative Writing" following a book by Judy Reeves called "A Writer's Book of Days". It is full of snippets and encouragements about writing, and also gives a "writing prompt" for every day of the year. I only manage to get around to doing this in any regular fashion in August, and as I did the August prompts last year, I'm following May this year.

I'm already behind; today I have reached May 5th and the prompt is "The moon made me do it"

Here goes:

"Hunting for Rhymes"

The moon made me do it,
Made me make a rhyme with "spoon",
And also think of June,
Dark nights, lined with silver.

The sun made me do it,
Made me make a dreadful pun,
A vision of my son
Sitting with an orange.

The star made me do it,
Made me think of space, so far,
The distant skies, black as tar,
Pinpoints, shining like new iron.


I think I really should stop here.
These rhymes are grating on my ear.


Being original
Isn't a realistical
Option
Today.
stop

Thursday 1st August - Discovering Poetry

I've just finished a chapter on poetry in Cultural Amnesia. It's very hard to avoid typing out the whole chapter again here.

Some of it was about memorising poetry, which links into my thoughts on memorising music - I've highlighted them for future consideration, and maybe creating a post over on www.themusicjungle.co.uk

Some of it is on reading prose and poetry in the original language, which I've already posted about. He covers this topic elsewhere in the book.

Some of it is about poetry itself; rhythm and metre and rhyme.

As a result of reading this chapter, I spent a lot of time today (on the train, on the underground, in waiting rooms, in cafes) reading poems, courtesy of the internet: www.poetryfoundation.org/  and also www.poetry.com and also on my Kindle, where I loaded Palgrave's Golden Treasury for free a couple of weeks ago.

On the tube, I read this, one of the series of "Poems on the Underground", which just happened to be opposite me, (above the head of the young man I'd had a word with about abandoning his take-away bag on the platform - "yeah, it's naughty of me, I know" he said. I gave him the look I usually reserve for a certain child in year 3 at a certain school)

The Conversation of Old Men  

Thom Gunn

He feels a breeze rise from
the Thames, as far off
as Rotherhithe, in
intimate contact with
water, slimy hulls,
dark wood greenish
at waterline - touching
then leaving what it
lightly touches; he
goes on talking, and this is
the life of wind on water.

Then, following a lead from Clive James, I read Shelley - "Ode to the West Wind" http://www.poets.org/viewmedia.php/prmMID/15693
did you know that the last line of that is "If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?" I didn't, although I have come across that quotation. It's a brilliant poem! Shines like precious metal, sings like a symphony. Such amazing structure, rhythm, such a demanding rhyming structure...

Then, following another side alley of Clive James'  I read Philip Larkin's "The Whitsun Weddings"
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/learning/guide/180154#poem and that's another "wow" again. I love the changes in pace, the observation, the thought behind the words. I could see the whole thing in my head like a picture, or a film, unreeling in front of me.

These three poems are as different as Schumann to Delius to Philip Glass. I have entered a new world.

Sunday 28th July 2013 - A Birthday - Christina Rossetti

image from http://www.artsycraftsy.com/harrison/birthday_cr.jpg

This is one of the most joyous poems that I know.

 

 I've copied and pasted it from here: http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/174258 which is a good website for looking up poems.

A Birthday    Christina Rossetti 1830–1894

 My heart is like a singing bird

                  Whose nest is in a water'd shoot;

My heart is like an apple-tree

                  Whose boughs are bent with thickset fruit;

My heart is like a rainbow shell

                  That paddles in a halcyon sea;

My heart is gladder than all these

                  Because my love is come to me.

 

Raise me a dais of silk and down;

                  Hang it with vair and purple dyes;

Carve it in doves and pomegranates,

                  And peacocks with a hundred eyes;

Work it in gold and silver grapes,

                  In leaves and silver fleurs-de-lys;

Because the birthday of my life

                  Is come, my love is come to me.

I just love the air of spontaneity (I bet it took a longish time to achieve that!) and rush and running around madly in an orchard, and the way she looks for the grandest words and things she can think of in the second verse. Nothing as coarse or as obvious as diamonds and jewels, more like "heaven's embroidered cloths" and flourishes and palanquins (what's a palanquin? sounds good anyway). This is a howdah, which is not the kind of sound I wanted, but probably the sort of thing I'm thinking of. It goes on top of an elephant. That's another good sounding word.

Hathi Howdah or Elephant seat in the Mehrangarh Fort Museum.
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Here's a palanquin; turns out it is an Asian version of a sedan chair:



Kumagai on the Kisokaido, ukiyo-e prints by Keisai Eisen
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Sunday 30th June - Essays. Blogs. Jottings. Musings. Writing

I've always enjoyed reading collections of random writings;


"A Bee in the Kitchen" by H F Ellis (find out about him here) was one of my first introductions to the joys of the short well-constructed, piece of prose.

Bernard Levin' collected articles "Speaking Out" and so on - always brought a deeper level of understanding of the implications under the surface of the incident (Oh, how I miss that television programme, "Face the Music" with Joseph Cooper, Robin Ray, Joyce Grenfell Richard Baker and Bernard Levin. I miss it, miss it, miss it. Memo to self; can one buy recordings?)

Alison Utterly (an almost exact contemporary of my grandmother, I discovered from this) "Recipes from a Country Kitchen" and "A Country Child"

Garrison Keillor "Lake Woebegon Days"

Clive James "Cultural Amnesia", which I am reading now, and is in a different class to other collections of bits and pieces as it is so intense, so FULL of meanings, that a couple of pages blows my brain.

It's not quite the same as reading a diary (Kilvert, Edwardian Lady, Adrian Mole) although these too, at their best, are short, snapshot, vivid writings.

I find I can only read these collections in short bursts.

It is like reading poetry; you should really only read one or two poems at a time in order to find the inner lines, the cunning construction, the real purpose of the words.

It is like eating something strongly flavoured, or intensely sweet, or darkly chocolated, or delicately spiced.

It is like listening to "real" music, composed with intelligence and passion, played with articulation and communication and care.

It is like properly looking at a picture, following the lines, absorbing the colours and shapes, delving into the meaning.

Skim-reading, background music, food-for-refuelling all have their place in this world, I suppose, but their are wasteful ways to consume true art.

PS by "real" music, I don't mean exclusively "classical"!

What has this to do with blogs?

I was just wondering, at the start of all this rattling through the keys, if the best blogs were not a natural successor to the essays, diaries, collected articles, that were published in books and papers and periodicals, before this blogging revolution got underway.

You have to kiss an awful lot of frogs to find your prince, they say (I think I found mine after just one or two, so I struck lucky. Prince, that is). What would be the same kind of phrase with regard to blogs, I wonder.

PPSS And what is the equivalent phrase for princesses? I'll ask twitter.