The places I go are never there

[sovay]

My poem "Spirit Photography" has been accepted by Through the Gate. The magazine is a new market; the poem is the direct result of one of those dreams that hybridize figures from waking life with history and random brainstem spatters, in this case a theater tour of Faerie and the never-recovered camera carried up Everest by George Mallory in 1924. There is an entire genre of dreams I can never figure out what to do with, so I'm glad this one turned into something.

(I feel as if I am developing a subgenre of ghost poems: Lucan, Christopher Morcom/Alan Turing, Ludwig Wittgenstein, Thomas Andrews, George Mallory; the eponym of "Ovid's Two Nightmares" is not a ghost in the poem, but he certainly isn't alive now. It must have started in 2003 when I wrote about Young Vilna for strange_selkie, but it seems to be accelerating in recent months. There are ways in which I suppose it's not all that different from writing about myths and gods. It feels like something else: it requires more research, but it also requires more responsibility. Everybody and their cousin has a Persephone poem and I accept that not all of them are going to fall within my ideas of reasonable interpretation. (I reserve the right to be cranky as death about it, though. There are maybe four authors who don't annoy me on Norse myth and two of them are on this friendlist?) Stories throw out variants like many-worlds quantum mechanics: it's what they do. A god has a different face for everyone from the moment it's described. There are parameters on lives, on history. I don't want to get them wrong. The dead have enough troubles; they don't need me misrepresenting them. What I should really pay attention to is: why these ghosts. There are others I would have expected. Maybe they'll come along.)

I don't think there's been anything particularly memorial about it, but it's been a good weekend so far. Friday was marked by a visit to the home of two of derspatchel's friends: it is a former boarding house once occupied by the composer of "Jingle Bells" and deserves its name, being full of odd little corners of rooms and roof-slants and second kitchens where you don't expect them. We were taught the correct way to do vodka shots. (It turns out to involve black bread, pickled olives, and smoked whitefish. You don't get a hangover and you're all set for visiting a deli for the next few days.) We did not play, but were duly impressed by the antique board game—discovered in the barn—where the various trading countries are things like "Servia" and "Sarawak" and on the other side a race between electric and gas-powered cars includes penalty squares like "Shot by Man You Ran Over, -10 Points." There were hours of conversation. I have a new translation of The Master and Margarita to look for. Saturday, I crashed early in the evening: listened to an episode of The Mask of Inanna, watched some YouTube fragments of a BBC Play of the Week, read a book of poems by Medbh McGuckian, and managed to stay asleep for nearly ten hours. Today, Rob and I tried Café Algiers (where I'd had mint iced chocolate with Dean on Friday) for dinner and were rewarded by really good hummus, falafel and merguez respectively, and tamarind soda where you pour the seltzer into the syrup yourself; we saw A Day at the Races (1937) at the Brattle Theatre and I have no plans for tomorrow.

The Economist gave its obituary to Dietrich Fischer-Dieskau.

Comments

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

I heard Medbh McGuckian read once, and was completely baffled. Sonewhat consoled when one of the poets I much admire confessed herself likewise. How did you get on with her?

Also, I'm with nineweaving on the book of ghosts.

[ashlyme.livejournal.com]

I'd read the book of ghosts too.

[domparisien.livejournal.com]

Same.

[sovay]

I'd read the book of ghosts too.

Thanks. If enough of them come up to tell their stories.

[sovay]

How did you get on with her?

The collection was The Flower Master (1982), which I bought from a used book store because some of her poems were included in the gigantic Anthology of Modern Irish Poetry. I like the sound and some of the shapes of her language; much of it feels too billowing and abstract, but I can't tell if that's because I'm not picking up on the allusions or because the poems are intrinsically vague. Probably this one sticks with me the most:

The Heiress

You say I should stay out of the low
fields; though my hands love dark,
I should creep till they are heart-shaped,
like Italian rooms no longer hurt by sun.

When I look at the striped marble of the glen,
I see the husbandry of a good spadesman,
lifting without injury, or making sure
where the furrow is this year the ridge
will be the next; and my pinched grain,
hanging like a window on the smooth spot
of a mountain, or a place for fawns, watches
your way with horses, your delicate Adam work.

But I am lighter of a son, though my slashed
sleeves the inner sleeves of purple keep remembering
the moment exactly, remembering the birth
of an heiress means the gobbling of land.

Dead leaves do not necessarily
fall; it is not coldness, but the tree itself
that bids them go, preventing their destruction.
So I walk along the beach, unruly, I drop
among my shrubbery of seaweed my black acorn buttons.

It feels like a history poem; it has enough specific detail that I think I could track it down, even if images like "hanging like a window on the smooth spot / of a mountain" seem chosen more for the side-by-side of each separate word than for any overarching likeness.

Then we get something like—

The Blue She Brings with Her

November—like a man taking all
his shirts, and all his ties, little by little—
enters a million leaves, and that
lion-coloured house-number, the sun,
into his diary; with a rounded symbol—
Nothing—to remind himself of callow apples,
dropping with a sense of rehearsal in June
as if their thought were being done by others.

The mirror bites into me as cloud into
the river-lip of a three-cornered lake
that when the moon is new is shaped
like the moon. With a sudden crash
my log falls to ashes, a wood of winter
colours I have never seen—blood-kissed,
the gold-patterned dishes
show themselves for a moment like wild creaures.

While any smoke that might be going loose
the hot room gathers like a mountain
putting out a mist, and not the kind that clears.
Something you add about mountains makes
my mouth water like a half-lifted cloud
I would choose, if I could, to restrain
as a stone keeps its memories.

Your eyes change colour as you move
and will not go into words. Their swanless
sky-curve holds like a conscious star
a promise from the wind about the blue
she brings with her. If beauty lives
by escaping and leaves a mark, your wrist
will have the mark of my fingers in the morning.

I love those last three lines. I don't know why "swanless" or "conscious." I don't know why "blood-kissed." "Lion-coloured house-number" is a good hot gold circle as well as recalling the sun passing through the houses of the zodiac, but then the poet glosses it—"the sun"—just in case you didn't get the reference. I like the image of June as an overeager dry run for November, but the following line is entirely superfluous, the idea of one's thoughts being acted out by others already implicit in "rehearsal"—that's sort of the definition of theater. (And now that I think about it, shouldn't the apples be on the other side of that equation if they're the ones rehearsing?) I don't think of myself as a literal poet. I have been accused of writing word salad; I throw similes all over the place and I can't even blame Peter S. Beagle anymore. I kept wanting to prune these poems or at least ask what the under-connections were that had brought up the various metaphors and put them together.

(Continued in next comment, because I ran out of space.)

[sovay]

There was one section in the eight-part poem "Lucina," "The Newborn"—

The Newborn

My china animals face into the room:
I have opened all the locks, that you might
Pass safely through a swarm of bees,
Or safely stare into the poppy's centre
Without meeting any lightwaves longer than blue.

The hammock of your eyes, like a woman's
Apron falling off, will find a parting
In my hair, a loaf broken open,
The secretive sky, all its mystic vines and cobwebs,
Sensing feebly the arrival of boats.

I have no idea what to do with that except maybe re-read Verlaine or Le Bateau ivre and see if there's something I'm missing. And I like the Symbolists, too.

Also, I'm with nineweaving on the book of ghosts.

There seem to be others with you. I don't have enough for a book now, but if they turn up, I will let you know.

[moon-custafer.livejournal.com]

I like the first line.

[sovay]

I like the first line.

She may be a poet I need to be taught how to read. But it's been a long time since I met someone I couldn't figure out myself.

[shewhomust.livejournal.com]

I suspect that if you and I and the poet I would prefer not to identify are all finding Medbh McGuckian this difficult to decipher, the problem is hers not ours - and I'm interested that you are able to read past that, and to find the things that do please you in her writing.

And yes, of course, don't go summoning ghosts - 'if they turn up' is fair enough!

[sovay]

and I'm interested that you are able to read past that, and to find the things that do please you in her writing.

See reply to kore_on_lj below for someone discovered through the same anthology I'd actively recommend.

And yes, of course, don't go summoning ghosts - 'if they turn up' is fair enough!

It's complicated enough when we don't ask for them . . .