Volatile Gap

Sorry about the gap in blog posts. Having difficulty finding anything worthwhile to say at the moment. Will be back when my brain kicks into gear again which hopefully it will at some point in time.

Hidalgo and the death of mythology

There are 8,200 people on blogger that include Hidalgo on their list of favourite films. This wonderful tale of the down and out guy complete with down and out horse neither of which have a hope of pulling through and winning a race ( or do they )ticks every mythological, fairy tale type box that Joseph Campbell ever came up with. Except that the story is true.

Apart from being in love with Viggo, a condition I share with a few other zillion people on the planet, I continue to be fascinated with the role of myth in writing. Where would storytelling be without it? Of all the cultures in all the towns in all the world there isn't a single one that doesn't have traditions of God, spirituality, birth, death, resurrection, incarnation, call it what you will, most people believe in the existence of something beyond the physical world across the surface of which we all plod to work everyday. That which Campbell called 'the literature of the spirit'.

Not only do these literatures exist everywhere but many of the same motifs appear time and time again, regardless of their country of origin.

Ignoring the post-colonial tendency of Americans to make films about Americans winning everything while the poor ineffectual locals can only be left gazing in wistful admiration, here is an interesting thing. In Hidalgo, the Viggo character has to re-find his roots (his mother was an American Indian), seeing as a mirage the ancestors dancing, before he can find the strength to move forward. The American movie making machine desperate to re-enact a culture and mythology it helped to destroy.

I came across the following in Campbell's book: 'The Power of Myth'.

In 1852 he United States Government inquired about buying tribal lands for the arriving people of the United States. Chief Seattle wrote a marvellous letter in reply. It is quite a long letter but the following is an extract:

"The President in Washington sends word that he wishes to buy our land. But how can you buy or sell the sky? The land? The idea is strange to us. If we do not own the freshness of the air and the sparkle of the water, how can you buy them? ... This we know: the earth does not belong to man, man belongs to the earth. All things are connected like the blood that unites us all. Man did not weave the web of life, he is merely a strand in it. Whatever he does to the web, he does to himself.

"Your destiny is a mystery to us. What will happen when the buffalo are all slaughtered? The wild horses tamed? What will happen when the secret corners of the forest are heavy with the scent of many men and the view of the ripe hills is blotted by talking wires? Where will the thicket be? Gone! Where will the eagle be? Gone!And what is it to say goodbye to the swift pony and the hunt? The end of living and the beginning of survivial."

How's that for prescience?

Its the poetry that counts ... or is it

How extraordinary to hear Tennyson himself reading one of his poems. If you caught Ian Hislop's progeamme 'The Changing of the Bard' on BBC2 tonight, that is exactly what you would have heard. The programme charted the (mostly downright chaotic) role of the Poet Laureate along with lists of those who had accepted or who had not accepted. Yeats was not offered the post because the powers that be were worried about his Irish-ness. Wordsworth managed seven full years in the post without writing a single poem.

'The Charge of the Light Brigade' was the star of the show. Not only the most famous and popular poem ever written by a Laureate, but there is an extant recording (from a wax cylinder) of the man himself reading. It sounded not unlike a reading by a Dalek - not helped apparently by the fact that Tennyson's son had stored the wax cylinder next to a radiator.

But I confess the programme left me even more bemused than I already was at the strange acceptance by Carole Ann Duffy, particularly in regard to Hislop's statement that the post holder shouldn't say anything too controversial - or too interesting. I can't somehow imagine Duffy not being interesting.

Tears in the Fence

David Caddy, may the light of the Valar shine upon his every endeavour, is to publish an essay of mine in the summer issue of Tears in the Fence on commercial influence in the language of contemporary poetry.

This is very exciting for me. I have had some poems published but not a critical piece before.

Tears is a great magazine - the Winter edition hosted work from such luminaries as Tom Lowenstein, Matt Merritt, Cora Greenhill and Todd Swift.

While on the subject and from this very same issue comes a fascinating dialogue on poetics from Robert Archambeau/Adam Fieled.

The discussion/argument/war/cataclysmic world defeating armageddon which rages on about whether poetry should 'say' or 'mean' or 'do' or, if any of those things, what it should say, mean, do I find endlessly interesting. Discussions of language and its meanings - transparent or otherwise - are of huge practical value in helping me to recognise what I'm looking for in other people's writing and what I'm trying to achieve in my own. This is not to say that a poem should be like a film - full of special effects deliberately placed there to entertain the audience - but it does mean that some examination of the current thinking on language and meaning is helpful.

In this article, Robert Archambeau quotes Reginald Shepherd:

T.S. Eliot said that the poet must be as intelligent as possible; Wallace Stevens said that the poem must resist the intelligence almost successfully. It is in the play between the intelligence of language and the resistance to intelligence of language as an object that poetry occurs. What matters is not what a poem can say, a preoccupation Harold Bloom shares with the multiculturalists he so despises, but what a poem can do. I look to poetry for what only poems can do, or what poems can do best - to alienate language from its alienation of use (the phrase is Adorno's), to treat language as an end in itself rather than a mere means: to communication, expressions, or even truth.


There are two ends of this argument ranging from:

poems- should-always- be- transparent-and- mean- something- to- the- reader
to
language -produces- meaning- rather- than- the- other- way- around

The school of language poets base their ideas on the latter rather than the former philosophy.

I wonder if language poetry is really as different as it likes to think - or whether it seems that way now that it has been around for forty odd years. Wildly rebellious things of the sixties are all establishment now aren't they?

I don't know but I shall have to go away and find out. The trouble is with being interested in poetry is that you arrive at a little plateau only to find there are a dozen more mountainous peaks beyond.

The Poetic Spirit

I came across the following quotation when reading.    Daisaku Ikeda is President of the SGI.

 

"The poetic spirit encourages people in all ranks and places to return to their naked humanity.  Neither sentimental nor fantastic, it embraces and affirms the whole world and its inhabitants; it imparts the will to remain optimistic and unbending in the face of all hardships.

 As a believer in innate human goodness, I am certain that the concentrated power of good can overcome the greatest forces of evil.  The poetic spirit helps us control the greed-dominated self.  It helps us handle the actual while keeping our eyes turned toward the ideal."

 

 

                                                                                                            Daisaku Ikeda

Camper Van Blues

Phew! It sure is hot.

Fallen in love, Toad style, with the idea of a gypsy caravan, painted in glorious blues and yellows (which paint would of course never peel ) which would miraculously always be warm enough to be used and photographed with Cath Kidston accessories in a lifestyle magazine. Poop poop. The open road.

True, I have been out in the hot sun all day which may have affected my rational thinking.

I do not have such a glorious remnant of a freezing bygone age available to me but have been absorbed by another, altogether darker side of camping.

In between bouts of twig snapping and digging and cursing, all of which should have been done 8 weeks ago, I have been reading Jane Holland's 'Camper Van Blues'. A superb volume this. I particularly like the title sequence which describe in translucent and painful imagery the journey of a woman alone and lonely 'on the road'. Throughout the sequence there is are painted scenes of the urban landscape overpowering a solitary human - imagery worthy of an Edward Hopper painting.

Dover Cliff

Haddock and chips, 3a.m.

Smoke a thin roll-up.

Check the oil, the tyres,

then on the road again.

When in Day Tripping , the narrator says

three months now

unable to pray or pay rent

or put pen to paper.

...somehow you know how she feels.

Making Hay while the sun shines

Now that the sun is out I have abandoned my feeble attempts at anything which could be described as writing and have declared my annual war on weeds.    I ignore the garden most of the year until its Chelsea on the telly (and the sun shines for two and a half days) whereupon I rush to the garden centre, take pity on a few, remaining, straggly plants that haven't been snapped up in the bank holiday rush, and become a gardener for a day. 

I love gardening but can only stand and stare with goggle-eyed admiration at people who do it all year round.    All that mud!

 Just back from a week-end at the Hay Festival.  The trouble with festivals is that they rely on big names to attracts lots of customers.  Then the customers turn up in their droves to see and hear the big names but still the smaller names struggle for attention.  The smaller names in poetry are anyone who isn't famous Seamus.

Apparently there were tickets available for Ruth Padel right up to the last moment until she resigned and hit the headlines - then the tickets sold out in ten minutes. 

 Still I can hardly whinge about people going to hear the great and the good.  I went to see Alan Bennett and they don't come much greater or funnier for my  money.    Mr. Bennett joked that Neil MacGregor (Director of the British Museum) had called him 'the man in the street'.    Somehow it seems that he is - even when 1000 people have squashed into a tent to listen to him.  Its the self-deprecating humour and the genuine modesty.