We're dying on another day

[sovay]

My poem "The Trouble Over" is now online at Uncanny Magazine.

I wrote it last Armistice Day; it's a ghost poem for Isaac Rosenberg. He is one of my very favorite poets of the First World War, even though like almost everyone else I discovered him well after Wilfred Owen, Siegfried Sassoon, or even David Jones. Most of the things about him that are important to me are in the poem, but I recommend Jean Moorcroft Wilson's Isaac Rosenberg: The Making of a Great War Poet (2008) and Vivian Noakes' 21st-Century Oxford Authors: Isaac Rosenberg (2008) if you are curious about more. The title comes from a letter he wrote to Edward Marsh in December 1915: "I never joined the army for patriotic reasons. Nothing can justify war. I suppose we must all fight to get the trouble over." Given the generally shoddy state of Rosenberg's health even before the war, I have also always had a certain amount of sympathy for the sentiment expressed in another letter to Marsh, this one from February 1917: "This winter is a teaser for me; and being so long without a proper rest I feel as if I need one to recuperate and be put to rights again. However, I suppose we'll stick it, if we don't there are still some good poets left who might write me a decent epitaph."

Comments

[cmcmck]

Somehow, I discovered Rosenberg first and he led to he rest but then I was taught for a time by the wonderful Harvey Gilman and there can't be too many gay Jewish Quakers in captivity.

It's also his fault that I'm a Quaker! :o)

[sovay]

Somehow, I discovered Rosenberg first and he led to he rest but then I was taught for a time by the wonderful Harvey Gilman and there can't be too many gay Jewish Quakers in captivity.

That's really nice! I was never taught any of the war poets formally, with the possible exception of Owen—my high school Latin teacher gave us "Dulce et Decorum Est" after we had read the relevant Horace. It terrified me.

[oracne]

Well, you are a good poet and wrote him a poem if not an epitaph!

[sovay]

Well, you are a good poet and wrote him a poem if not an epitaph!

Thank you!

I always hope the people I write these poems for would like knowing about them. I don't want to embarrass the dead. (Unless, I mean, they deserve it, but that's reserved more for the certain living these days.)

[brigdh]

I love your poem, and ooof, what a quote from that last letter.

[sovay]

I love your poem, and ooof, what a quote from that last letter.

Thank you! And, yeah.

[asakiyume]

I love the way you communicate across time and across the boundaries of life and death with people. Part of community is bringing people into conversation (a pretty major part...), and you do that with the living and the dead. It's great.

[sovay]

Part of community is bringing people into conversation (a pretty major part...), and you do that with the living and the dead. It's great.

Thank you!

I think being in community with the dead as well as the living may be important to me.

[anna_wing]

Hello. We're not acquainted, but I've followed your LJ, and I was very happy to find you here through asakiyume. I like your work very much, both the poetry and the short stories. If you don't mind, might I ask if you are a connection of the late Richard, Graf von Taaffe, who discovered taaffeite?

[sovay]

Hello. We're not acquainted, but I've followed your LJ, and I was very happy to find you here through asakiyume. I like your work very much, both the poetry and the short stories.

Thank you! I am pleased to meet you and I appreciate you introducing yourself, even though I don't think I run the kind of journal where it is formally necessary. People drop in and out all the time.

If you don't mind, might I ask if you are a connection of the late Richard, Graf von Taaffe, who discovered taaffeite?

Yes, but not closely. My father's father styled himself in descent from the Austrian Taaffes because you can get away with that sort of thing when you were born in San Francisco before 1906 and your birth certificate goes up with the rest of the earthquake and fire, so my brother and I grew up believing it to the point where I remember researching Austria on one side and the Pale of Settlement on the other for some family-history presentation in elementary school, but sometime when I was in college my father's youngest brother got into genealogy and it turned out we're descended from some Irish Taaffes who came over in the mid-nineteenth century. It is the same family; it's a very traceable last name. I am just nowhere in line for the Austrian or the Irish titles, even if either of them still existed. I still used to enjoy visiting the specimens of taaffeite in the Harvard Museum of Natural History. They are attractively garnet-colored and equally out of my reach.

[anna_wing]

Thank you! I happen to have a taaffeite (about one carat, vaguely lilac-coloured, very spinel-like), which I picked up in Myanmar more than a decade ago, before the change to civilian government. It wasn't expensive in those days, though still very rare; a specialist interest, not a stone with jewellery value, so there wasn't a lot of local market for it. As you say, it is a striking name, and when I saw yours I had to ask!

[sovay]

As you say, it is a striking name, and when I saw yours I had to ask!

I don't mind at all! I think it's wonderful that you own a taaffeite.