Re: poetry thread

[Guest]

...just wanted these on the same page eddie

The Great Pit of Aldgate (1665), as described by Daniel Defoe in "Journal of the Plague Year".

[eddie]

Here's the flag that's been flying from the second-floor window of the building on the other side of Aldgate High Street for the past couple of months. You might like this on the same page, too:

[Guest]

...come on eddie...what do you think it's doing there?

[Guest]

...I looked up the church.

Church of St. Botolph's

The Church of St. Botolph's is mentioned in records dating back to 1125.

St. Botolph was a pious Saxon Abbot who had built a monastery in Lincolnshire in 654AD. Saint Botolph is the Patron Saint of Boston, Massachusetts. The name was taken as a derivative of "Botolph's town" which became known "Boston".

The current church was erected between 1725 and 1740 and dedicated to the Patron Saint of Travellers and Itinerants.

The Church of St. Botolph's was known as the 'Prostitutes' church' because the ladies would solicit their trade in this area. Catherine Eddowes, a victim of the notorious Jack the Ripper was seen drunk in the vicinity of the church on the night of her murder on 30th September 1888.

[eddie]

...come on eddie...what do you think it's doing there?

A sign of the coming global economic/social apocalypse, obviously. Aldgate serves London's financial district (the 'City'). See the Off Topic 'International bankers, IMF, Eurozone etc' thread.

[eddie]

The current church was erected between 1725 and 1740 and dedicated to the Patron Saint of Travellers and Itinerants.

The Church of St. Botolph's was known as the 'Prostitutes' church' because the ladies would solicit their trade in this area. Catherine Eddowes, a victim of the notorious Jack the Ripper was seen drunk in the vicinity of the church on the night of her murder on 30th September 1888.

The vicar of St Botolph's conducts the annual sevice of commemoration, held in the station booking hall, to the 7/7 Tube bombing victims on the Circle Line train approaching Aldgate station on 7th July 2005.

Mitre Square- site of Kate Eddowes murder- is a 3-minute walk from the station entrance. We're overrun with Ripper tours, for the vicarious delectation of tourists.

[Guest]

Mitre Square- site of Kate Eddowes murder- is a 3-minute walk from the station entrance. We're overrun with Ripper tours, for the vicarious delectation of tourists.

...tourists...the same everywhere. They come here hoping to glimpse a giant-crocodie attack. The most they see is a fibreglass replica of Krys, a monstous croccy, in the town downriver.

...they have photographs of themselves taken sitting in its mouth.

[Guest]

There are no serial killers or crocodiles here so the tourists behave themselves...

[Guest]

Tourist
by Paul Engle 1908–1991

I am an American tourist in my room writing letters.
Outside the air of Calcutta trembles in the terrible heat.
Air conditioning gently wraps me in cool air.
I call room service and the cold drinks
fly in like tame birds on my bearer's hand.

The Wisdom of the East, I decide, drinking,
would be wiser if it used more American devices
to give the body ease, thus freeing the mind
for meditation on eternity.

I sit there writing careful English,
wanting to make the deliberate phrases prove
that I really am here in an Asian country,
a jet-propelled Marco Polo,
my blood stream brave with shots and antibodies.

Outside the window, screams.
They go on and on, each an echo of the other,
in a dark, small, desperate voice.

I am outraged by that rage.

Who can write words, hearing that wordless noise?
Did I fly over oceans and mountains
to sit here and yell at that yelling?

I rush out to the street
wearing indignation and a dark businessman's suit.

Sound stops.

A thin and hungry woman has just given
her brown breast to a hungry child.
Nothing of her has fulness but that breast.

In this heat, even my eyes sweat!

I wrap my shame in a smile like spit in a Kleenex.

[eddie]

Poets and writers gather in the Pennines for Ted Hughes weekend

Recitals, walks and even hunting for the homes of gnomes. The Guardian Northerner's Hebden Bridge correspondent Jill Robinson looks forward to a busy weekend


Rugged, like the landscape of his childhood. Calderdale prepares to celebrate Ted Hughes. Photograph: Nils Jorgensen/Rex Features

The annual Ted Hughes Festival , organised by the Elmet trust whose patron is Simon Armitage, takes place this weekend, 21-23 October, when the upper Calder Valley village of Mytholmroyd honours its most famous son.

The late Poet Laureate spent his boyhood here, and many local features play a central role in his poetry – the moors, the woods, the canal, and the dark cliff of Scout Rock – "A wall of rock and steep woods half way up to the sky" - which continues to give this part of the valley a sombre aspect.

Inevitably, several other landmarks, such as the Zion Chapel, which was just across the road from Hughes' home, and many of the mills he passed on his way to school have long since been demolished. But there are still people living in Mytholmroyd who can recall attending Burnley Road Primary School with Ted in the 1930s.

Mytholmroyd railway station has been decorated with illustrated panels in his memory, too, depicting extracts from his classic children's story, "the Iron Man". But plans to convert the old station building into a Ted Hughes Centre appear to have foundered for the time being.

I first came across Ted Hughes' poetry as a schoolgirl in Devon, studying modern poetry for O level English Literature in the late 1960s, unaware that he was by that time living elsewhere in my then county. I had not heard of Mytholmroyd, and never dreamed that I would eventually come to live in the shadow of Scout Rock. When reading the moving poem "Six Young Men", I little imagined that I would years later walk to Lumb Falls, where the photograph of the men was taken; six months after the picture, all six of its subjects had been killed in the Great War.


Anne Fine Northern star Anne Fine; one of those taking part

This weekend's celebrations encompass a wide variety of activities, including story -telling, talks, guided walks, readings, discussions, children's events, a poetry and music concert, a documentary film, and a poetry slam to be held in Ted's childhood home at Aspinall Street, which is now available to rent for short breaks and writers' retreats. Well-known names appearing include Liz Lochead and Anne Fine.

Many of the events will take place in the theatre at Calder High School, named in honour of Ted Hughes; although appropriately for a poet who loved to be out of doors, several are being held in the open air, including an afternoon of Gnoming in Nutclough Woods. Poetry lovers can also spend the whole day at Hebden Bridge Library on Sunday, attending workshops and readings by contemporary poets.

© 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

[Guest]

Lovesong

by Ted Hughes
He loved her and she loved him
His kisses sucked out her whole past and future or tried to
He had no other appetite
She bit him she gnawed him she sucked
She wanted him complete inside her
Safe and Sure forever and ever
Their little cries fluttered into the curtains

Her eyes wanted nothing to get away
Her looks nailed down his hands his wrists his elbows
He gripped her hard so that life
Should not drag her from that moment
He wanted all future to cease
He wanted to topple with his arms round her
Or everlasting or whatever there was
Her embrace was an immense press
To print him into her bones
His smiles were the garrets of a fairy place
Where the real world would never come
Her smiles were spider bites
So he would lie still till she felt hungry
His word were occupying armies
Her laughs were an assasin's attempts
His looks were bullets daggers of revenge
Her glances were ghosts in the corner with horrible secrets
His whispers were whips and jackboots
Her kisses were lawyers steadily writing
His caresses were the last hooks of a castaway
Her love-tricks were the grinding of locks
And their deep cries crawled over the floors
Like an animal dragging a great trap
His promises were the surgeon's gag
Her promises took the top off his skull
She would get a brooch made of it
His vows pulled out all her sinews
He showed her how to make a love-knot
At the back of her secret drawer
Their screams stuck in the wall
Their heads fell apart into sleep like the two halves
Of a lopped melon, but love is hard to stop

In their entwined sleep they exchanged arms and legs
In their dreams their brains took each other hostage

In the morning they wore each other's face

[eddie]

Poem of the week: Square One by Roddy Lumsden

It's all go in this week's poem, a giddy and distinctly Oulipan look at a London day

Carol Rumens
guardian.co.uk, Monday 17 October 2011 12.07 BST


City workers walk across London Bridge. Photograph: Oli Scarff/Getty Images

Several commentators on recent books blogs have said they'd like to see a discussion of Roddy Lumsden's poetry, and PotW's own MeltonMowbray posted a request earlier this year. So for this week's poem, I've chosen one of my favourites from Lumsden's latest collection, Terrific Melancholy (recommended if you haven't already got a copy). I hope aficiandos and new readers alike will enjoy the elegiac virtuosity of "Square One."

Panning shots of the razzmatazz of contemporary London begin with an unnaturally motionless River Thames, which contrasts with the surrounding fluidity of endless construction and self-invention. The location is mirrored in spirited, slangy diction, and a repetitive device that stitches all together in bright gold lamé thread. On the page, you almost see the green light. Read the poem aloud, and you hear the gunning of engines in the repetition of the hard "g" – described in phonetics as a voiced, velar stop.

This technique recalls the generative devices of the poets and novelists of the Oulipo (Ouvroir de littérature potentielle) who choose specific verbal constraints as a means of triggering ideas. The most famous, and diabolically complicated, is probably the "story-making machine", set in motion by Georges Perec in the construction of his novel, Life: A User's Manual. Poets have experimented with lipograms, palindromes, etc. Whereas these techniques need not, and mostly do not, emerge from the material, the "go" device in "Square One" connects directly to the poem's theme and rhythmic energy-supply. It also echoes the dominant phonemes in the names of the two mythological giants who'll emerge in the poem's last line – Gog and Magog.

This is the London of Boris, bendy buses and bad bankers, but it's also a tumult of lives harder to record, more slippery and edgy. As well as "the emos, indie kids/ Goths and ravers melting down the day" in stanza one, the prefix nets a jolly haul of "gowks", "gonzos", "gorillas" and "gomerils" to flesh out the "city's multiplicity of fools". Food is a vivid class-indicator: the "retired politicians" feast on dumplings and meggyleves (Hungarian sour-cherry soup) as well as scandal, while others "stare at bangers and bubble, tea/ gone cold ... ". But the poem seems to imply freedom of choice. I like the fact that the power-brokers are simply given their space in the gorgeous, rotted tapestry, without comment. Brand- and place-names, from Gossamer to Gospel Oak, add further texture.

Are any other Oulipan devices used in the poem? I had a subliminal sense that further patterns were sometimes employed, but without being able to put a finger on them. I even wondered about the game of Go, which can be played with a 13 x 13 board (the stanzas are all 13-liners here), but drew a blank.

The title might suggest the Square Mile, or any of London's many squares: it also recalls Larkin's famous reference in "The Whitsun Weddings" to "postal districts, packed like squares of wheat", a curious simile, since, contrary to northern myth, London has many postal districts nearer the breadline than the cornbelt. "Square One" might be anywhere, but it implies return, a reluctant new start. While elegising a lost Albion, the poem knows that new mythical creatures are constantly being born.

Perhaps the day of the poem represents a vaster historical period, one stretching from an almost-absurd respectability ("gongs struck in gentlemen's clubs" to start the day and "dawn trains given the/ go-ahead at suburban junctions") to the present social chaos. The poem's author is a Scot, but an end-of-empire regret seems hinted. The accumulation of details evokes the thrill of change and movement, together with a despairing sense of being swept away into anonymity. Yet there's no question that the speaker loves the city. The sun rises and sets almost romantically in images of the "gold tide," the "slant shadows" of the high-rises, and the "misted moon." Noted for its stillness in the first stanza, the river remains obstinately static, but, at the end of the poem, it seems to have found a voice, and utters a punning command to "own torn myths". And this is exactly what the poem so exuberantly does.

 

Square One

Going steadily, rowed out from east to west, concrete
gondolas brink the Thames, which is still – it's the land which is
googled by gravity, thrown around - an optical illusion
good enough to fool the city's multiplicity of fools:
goons and gomerils who labour under Mammon's lash,
gowks and golems who queue to flash their lips and lids in
god-forsaken church halls, reeking basements and seeping
Golgothas, clamped blithe to ardour: the emos, indie kids,
Goths and ravers melting down the day we launched with
gongs struck in gentlemen's clubs, skirted girls at Nonsuch and
Godolphin thronging in corridors, dawn trains given the
go-ahead at suburban junctions, the first trace of the sun's
gold tide as it washes back to our side of the sphere, but now,

going for lunch, you swing between delight and throwaway,
gourmet and grease, dither between syrah in a silver
goblet or Tizer from a sprung can; you might stare over roasted
goose at the Gay Hussar, at your companion's bowl of
goulash, as retired politicians two tables over whisper scandals,
gossip through dumplings and meggyleves, hissing the latest
Gordon or Boris anecdote, Obama's honeymoon months,
government soap; you might stare at bangers and bubble, tea
gone cold; evening settles in at Kilburn, down Battersea Park;
Golders Green wanes; high-rises throw slant shadows over
Gospel Oak; students breathe the soot of a bendy revving on
Gower Street; in the doorways of basement strip joints,
gorillas strike stances; toms swap fat packs of Fetherlite and

Gossamer, hitch into their tangas and fishnets waiting for the
gonk to finger a phone box card, the way a kid fingers what he
got from the kitchen drawer; evening touches Camden where
gonzos sup Stella; dancers shift in the wings of the opera;
goluptious girls slip into slingbacks, swim into creamy
gowns, or swash out of them, as that misted moon plays
go-between in a city of secrets, crimson or bilious – what
good will come of us, falling in the dark, our names
gouged into plane-trees? – we are becoming history,
godmothers to our own torn myths: twisted and crazed,
gorgeous giants, we hang spinning over the still river:
Go on! it murmurs – own torn myths – and midnight mentions
Gog and Magog – sweet, towering boys, long gone.

© 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

[eddie]

Lines of beauty: the art of Sylvia Plath

Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes's life together inspired some of the most brilliant poetry of the last century. But Sylvia was also an accomplished artist. Frieda Hughes reveals the stories behind her mother's exquisite drawings

Frieda Hughes
The Observer, Sunday 23 October 2011


Portait of a family: Frieda Hughes with her mother, Sylvia Plath, and brother Nicholas in 1962. Photograph: Siv Arb

On 2 November, an exhibition of my mother Sylvia Plath's pen- and-ink drawings opens at the Mayor Gallery in Cork Street in London. These pictures were given to me by my father, the late Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, who died on 28 October 1998. But they were not my only legacy from my parents, if genetic make-up has anything to do with our inclinations; I have the frequently conflicted desire to write poetry and to draw and paint also. While my parents chose to direct their primary energies into writing, despite their ability as artists, I have found it impossible to do one without the other.

Although my mother is known primarily for her semi-autobiographical novel The Bell Jar and her poetry – particularly her last collection, Ariel, published posthumously in 1965 following her suicide on 11 February 1963 – her passion for art permeated her short life. Her early letters and diary notes and poems were often heavily decorated, and she hoped that her drawings would illustrate the articles and stories that she wrote for publication.

She met my father while she was reading English at Newnham College, Cambridge, from October 1955 to June 1957 on a Fulbright fellowship from the States. They married on 16 June 1956, honeymooning in Paris and Benidorm, which is where my mother did many of the drawings in this exhibition.

In 1956 an article she wrote about Spain was published in the Christian Science Monitor, illustrated with one of her drawings of Spanish fishing boats. On 28 August she wrote to her mother, Aurelia Plath: "I feel I'm developing a kind of primitive style of my own which I am very fond of. Wait till you see. The Cambridge sketch was nothing compared to these." Another article, "Explorations Lead to Interesting Discoveries", was published on 19 October 1959 by the same magazine, using drawings she'd done some time earlier of an old wood-burning stove, tyre and wheelbarrow outside a shed, and of a collection of earthenware bottles. The first of these drawings is included in the exhibition with a second, slightly different study of exactly the same subject. My mother often drew her subject more than once; my father's profile was, to my knowledge, drawn twice, once facing left, and once facing right, while they were in Paris.

Literature and art continually linked aspects of my parents' lives; my father mentions my mother's drawings in his last collection of poems, Birthday Letters. In his poem "Your Paris" he directly refers to my mother drawing the Paris roofs, a traffic bollard, a bottle, and him, too. In 1958, by which time my parents had moved to the US to work, a letter from ARTnews asked my mother for a poem on art; as a result she wrote eight poems inspired by the works of three of her favourite artists: Klee, Rousseau and De Chirico. On 22 March 1958, in another letter to her mother, she wrote: "I've discovered my deepest source of inspiration, which is art: the art of the primitives like Henri Rousseau, Gauguin, Paul Klee and De Chirico."

At the time of writing these poems my mother was interviewed for The Voice of the Poet on radio with my father and explained: "I have a visual imagination. For instance, my inspiration is painting and not music when I go to some other art form. I see these things very clearly."

For information about the exhibition, go to mayorgallery.com; Frieda Hughes will speak about her own poetry and painting on 29 October at the Mumford Theatre, Cambridge, as part of The Festival of Ideas (cam.ac.uk/festivalofideas)

© 2011 Guardian News and Media Limited or its affiliated companies. All rights reserved.

[Guest]

"Two women reading"
By Sylvia Plath

[Guest]

Antonio Machado now
by Ian Gibson

“And you my companion…”

Antonio Machado was 27 years old when his first book of verse, Soledades (Lonely Places, 1903), was published in Madrid. At that time, no
critic realized just how far that succint title summed up the theme that predominated throughout the 42 compositions making up his little book.
Today it is easier to discern. The solitary “poetic self” of those poems is often hinted at, and even avowed when he confides that he lost the love of his life as a little boy in Seville. Far from being a “literary theme”, it was in fact a true obsession. His inner self suddenly awakens in one of the poems. His heart is throbbing, “astonished and dispersed”. A few seconds before, he had been with his beloved in a field drenched with sunlight and rain. A rainbow shone in the sky above. And… her hair was wet from the rain! Yet even here we find the wrenching pain of the elusive vision: “And everything was flitting away in memory / like a soap bubble in the wind”. Machado meant what he said when he roundly asserted, in another poem, that “The only worthwhile thing in memory / is the supreme gift of conjuring up dreams”.

In other lines, that self declares itself to be incapable of “understanding even remotely” the cause behind the anguish that gripped
him. And yet he gives the lie to that straight away: “But I remember and, remembering, do say: / -Yes, I was a boy and you my companion.”

Freud taught us that not only can a child be in love but also suffer dreadfully for that love. Who is that lady company he alludes to in these
poems? One of the many maids that Antonio’s family employed over those years, as shown by the census records for Seville? That seems to be the most likely hypothesis. Besides, in another poem from that earliest period, a girl appears, “the youngest fairy”, who takes the boy to a merry festivity in a square where everyone is dancing. There she leaves him with a kiss on his forehead and, as she goes away, waves goodbye to him.

“Antonio never had that natural sense of joy you find in the young”, his mother recounted. The one who did was Manuel, their eldest son.

Las Dueñas Palace

Machado’s melancholy is usually associated with the palace of Las Dueñas, where he was born in 1875. There are frequent allusions to that
locus amoenus in his poetry, particularly in the opening lines of his celebrated “Retrato” (Portrait): “My childhood is all memories of a patio in
Seville, / and a light-filled orchard where the lemon tree thrived”. Contrary to the prevalent view, however, the boy spent only the first four years of his life in that magical edifice owned by the Duke and Duchess of Alba in which his father had rented a dwelling. Over the following four-year period, before the family moved to Madrid in 1883, they lived in a string of ordinary flats. So Machado lost his childhood paradise very early on. Before reaching his fifth birthday, it was goodbye to all the galleries and sun roofs, the myrtle and box hedges, the cypress and palm trees. No more would he be walking along white pathws or seeing that fountain reflecting orange and lemon trees, that profusion of jasmine and geraniums.

“Drops of Jacobin blood”

Those drops had come down to him from his grandfather, Antonio Machado Núñez, and from his father, Antonio Machado Álvarez. The
grandfather, born in Cadiz in 1815, was among other things a doctor, a geologist, botanist, anthropologist, ornithologist, volcanologist, diehard
republican, mayor of Seville following the overthrow of Isabel II in 1868, its provincial governor shortly afterwards, lecturer in Natural Sciences at Seville university, then its rector, a freemason, anticlerical, and one of the first to introduce Darwin’s theories in Spain. Clearly, an outstanding human being. And likeable with it! It was from him that the young Antonio learned to love going on walks in the country, loving nature in all its manysided manifestations… and from him too came the yearning for a Republic that was not to be because it was not allowed to be.

His grandmother, Cipriana Álvarez Durán, was a talented painter and folklorist. She taught the children to read from the Romancero general
ballad book compiled by her uncle Agustín, who had been the National Library’s first director. Mention must also be made of her father, José
Álvarez Guerra, who had fought against Napoleon and been an enemy of king Fernando VII, and had also published a outlandish philosophical
work, Unidad Simbólica, that was later to be condemned as heterodox by venerated scholar Menéndez y Pelayo. As for the poet’s father, the selfstyled “Demophile” (“Friend of the People”), he was Spain’s first great scholar of flamenco music (“flamencologist”), he wrote very well indeed, and he was to die at the age of 47 after giving his all to spreading folk studies, without getting a penny in return for his work.

This was an exceptional family. Just imagine the conversations in that household… With the concern felt there, above all else, for Spain, its
doing and its undoing.

Manuel, Antonio

Manuel was just eleven months older than Antonio. Both of them (along with José and Joaquín) were educated at Madrid’s Institución Libre
de Enseñanza. Both were later to remember how much they owed to Francisco Giner de los Ríos, though the school made a deeper impression
on Antonio, reinforcing the deep influence exerted on him by his grandfather, particularly regarding his love of nature. Here, however, it was
trips out to the Guadarrama mountains rather than those earlier walks along the banks of the Guadalquivir. Antonio came to feel almost as much devotion for Madrid’s neighbouring mountain range as Giner and Cossío.

After the Institución Libre school, where textbooks were not used, came the horrors of the official secondary-school baccalaureate syllabus,
which Machado only got round to finishing at the age of 25 after his first trip to fin-de-siècle Paris with his brother Manuel.

Manuel, all carefree and fun-loving as he was, gave free rein to his carpe diem inclinations rather than being prey to attacks of nostalgia. The
deep Andalusian and the skin-deep one – the old chestnut perpetually invoked by critics when comparing the two brothers. Nonetheless, as with all such clichés, there was some truth in it. While chasing the women came naturally to Manuel, Antonio was not in the same league (“Neither a Mañara the ladykiller nor a Bradomín have I been”). In that Paris on the eve of its Exhibition Universelle of 1900, and then again in 1902, Manuel was in his element. Antonio, less so, though he did encounter the revelation of symbolist poetry there, particularly Paul Verlaine’s: if it were not for his Poèmes saturniens, Machado’s Soledades could never have been. Inevitably, Manuel was more taken with Fêtes galantes.

Manuel and Antonio’s lives were to be inextricably bound up, and not just on account of their efforts in poetry or their joint work for the
theatre… Destiny was to turn the pair of them into symbols of the tragedy of Spain’s Civil War: Antonio, staunchly defending the Republic, while Manuel (trapped in Burgos at the beginning of the war) was championing Franco’s side.

The French teacher

Earning a living as a French teacher in a secondary school? It seems the idea had come from Giner. To gain a position as a teacher of such a
little-esteemed subject, a degree was not necessary – just the baccalaureate, and passing the competitive selection examinations. His first posting was in Soria, where he made in-depth contact with the Castilian landscape. And it was there to that he found love once more. Machado’s pupils, without any forcing from him, learned the French poems they were looking at in class off by heart, thereby advancing in their knowledge of the language. Lamartine’s “Le Lac”, poems by Musset, Rimbaud, Laforgue… Some of his students were never to forget those lines that they had committed to memory at that time.

Once Soledades was in print, Machado tried, without ever fully succeeding, to break out of his deep-seated introspection. He acknowledged
to Unamuno and Juan Ramón Jiménez his inclination to dream with his eyes wide open, to reach a kind of poetry closer to other people. He began to weed out of his verse everything that struck him as owing too much to modernism, as can be seen in his 1907 collection Soledades. Galerías. Otros poemas.

Might Leonor be the reincarnation of his “youngest fairy”? We know painfully little about her. She was thirteen years old when Machado first
met her. Fifteen when they married. Eighteen when he lost her. Not a single document relating to her seems to have survived. All we have is three or four photographs. Did she not write to her mother while she was staying in Paris in 1911-1912? Or to her mother-in-law? She must have done, but no letter is extant. Seemingly no close friend of Machado’s, not even Rubén Darío, left any written record of what that ill-starred girl was like – the girl whose loss, as Antonio himself said, would have driven him to suicide were it not for the unexpected success of his Campos de Castilla.

“Guiomar”

Sixteen years were to go by before Cupid sent another arrow his way (“Retrato” - Portrait) – seven of those years in his isolated “corner” in
Baeza, and then nine more in Segovia. Studying philosophy was his consolation over that time, which also saw the composition of his elegiac
cycle inspired by the memory of Leonor, as well as appreciable success in the plays he wrote with Manuel, and the birth of the “apocryphal”
characters Abel Martín and his disciple the sceptic Juan de Mairena, “poet of his time” (like Machado himself) and a master of “pugnacious rhetoric, or the art of bullying others with words”.

The miracle was wrought in 1928 when the poet Pilar de Valderrerama, a fervent admirer of his, came to Segovia to see him. It was
love at first sight. As a married Catholic lady, she could never be fully his, and she insisted on covering up their relationship. Nonetheless, that
incomplete love gave Machado potent reasons for carrying on living, struggling and hoping. Before fleeing to Portugal in 1936, Valderrama
destroyed some 200 letters from the poet, and then defaced the forty-odd letters that were left after the war. They are now kept in the National Library, and fortunately it has proved possible to piece them together again. Together with the “Canciones a Guiomar” (Songs to Guiomar) and “Otras canciones a Guiomar” (Other songs to Guiomar), they form one of the most beautiful and most moving testimonies to love to have come out of twentieth-century Spain.

The Republic, and war

Machado embraced the Second Republic with the same passionate commitment as his grandfather and father had embraced the First, and
when the traitorous generals rose up in arms against it, he did not hesitate to lend his name and his pen to the anti-fascist cause. He declared over and over again that he was, quite simply, “an old republican”, and that while he admired the contribution of Marxism to the liberation of mankind, he personally felt unable to go that far. As for his opinion of those who had taken up arms against the legally established republican regime and flooded his native land in a sea of blood and suffering, his criticism was implacable over the three years concerned. Firstly, from Valencia. Later, as from the summer of 1938, from Barcelona, where his articles in LA VANGUARDIA, often appearing under the name of the then “posthumous” Juan de Mairena, were aggrieved, wrathful attacks against the farce of non-intervention and the treachery of France and Britain.

Exile, death

In the end, when Barcelona was on the point of falling to the enemy, there came his flight to France in January 1939 with his aged mother, his
brother José and the latter’s wife: first to Can Santamaria and Max Faixat; then the horrors of the border, between Port Bou and Cerbère, under relentless rain and in the midst of a fear-stricken crowd; and finally, Collioure.

Ana Ruiz and her dearest son were to last only a few weeks. A few days after Antonio’s death, his brother José found a piece of paper in his old overcoat, bearing three notes jotted down with a pencil. The first consisted of the opening words of Hamlet’s soliloquy, “To be or not to be”, words that greatly obsessed the poet. The second was a line in alexandrine metre that read “These blue days and this sunshine of childhood ”. The last of the three was a variant on a stanza from his “Other songs to Guiomar”:

Y te daré mi canción:
Se canta lo que se pierde
con un papagayo verde
que la diga en tu balcón.

And I will give you my song:
what is lost is sung
with a green parrot
to sing the song on your balcony.

Thanks to this poignant document, we know that very shortly before he died, overcome with grief at the fall of the Republic, Antonio Machado’s thoughts were on the beloved woman who could not be his. And that, sensing that his life was drawing to a close, he felt transported back again to the Seville of his childhood.

Of this pre-eminent writer of prose and poetry, this godless Christian, stoically attentive to his own suffering and hence to the suffering of others, were are left with the consolation of his work, brimming over with emotion, intelligence and content. The voice of Antonio Machado in its various guises strikes us today as being indeed one of the most authentic and necessary voices in Spanish literature as a whole.

Translation: Bernard Molloy
© 2006 by Ian Gibson

[Guest]

Here Songs to Guiomar and Other Songs to Guiomar

[Guest]

Por ti la mar ensaya olas y espumas,
y el iris, sobre el monte, otros colores,
y el faisán de la aurora, canto y plumas,
y el búho de Minerva ojos mayores.
Por ti, ¡oh, Guiomar!…

For you the sea tries out its waves and foam,
and the rainbow of colors over the mountains,
and the pheasant of dawn, song and feathers,
and the large eyes of Minerva’s owl.
All for you, oh Guiomar!...

[Guest]

yep, the spoonma hehehe

[Guest]

...I see it now

[Guest]

Un pájaro de papel en el pecho
dice que el tiempo de los besos no ha llegado.

A paper bird in the breast
says the kissing time has not arrived.

- Vicente Aleixandre


It is really part of this:

Un pájaro de papel en el pecho
dice que el tiempo de los besos no ha llegado;
vivir, vivir, el sol cruje invisible,
besos o pájaros, tarde o pronto o nunca.
Para morir basta un ruidillo,
el de otro corazón al callarse,
o ese regazo ajeno que en la tierra
es un navío dorado para los pelos rubios.
Cabeza dolorida, sienes de oro, sol que va a ponerse;
aquí en la sombra sueño con un río,
juncos de verde sangre que ahora nace,
sueño apoyado en ti calor o vida.

Lorca quotes those two lines in Streets and Dreams from Poet in New York

[Guest]

Byli ochi ostreye tochimoi kosi -
Po zegzitse v zenitse i po kaple rosy, -
I edva nauchilis oni vo v'es rost
Razlichat odinokoye mnozhestvo zvezd

There were eyes like whetted scythes, as sharp,
with a cuckoo in each cornea and tear-drop dew,
yet they hardly learned, even in their magnitude,
to differentiate the solitary multiplicity of stars

- By Osip Mandelstam
(Translation by Herbert Marshall)
8-9, February 1937, Voronezh (in exile)

(is it a good translation, Pinz? I think ochi means eyes in Italian also)

Translation into Spanish for me:

Hubo ojos más cortantes que una
afilada guadaña
en un reloj de cuco y en una gota de rocío.

Y apenas enseñaron a distinguir en su tamaño
la multitud solitaria de las estrellas.

[Guest]

low tide
by blue moon

I wish we’d stopped somewhere civilised.

We live on a ridge.
West runs a coastline whose ribbon
of sharp shell-grit sand gives way
to black mud and mangroves.
East, rubber vines dot a wasteland of saltpans,
white-streaked and cracked from the sun.

Just south is a town
where some people huddle
in caravan parks, and some camp
in water tanks or cars under trees
on the side of the road.

It looks like it changed hands
in a card game, this mottled collage
of canvas and timber and corrugated tin,
perched as it is on one side of a river.

It looks like it wants to fall in.

Big pub, small school, a rust shuttered store
selling food, pumping petrol,and handing out mail.
Capriciously open a few hours a day
to shift-workers from the prawn factory,
deck-hands for the gold-rush at sea.

I wish we’d stopped somewhere civilised.

[Guest]

The memories and nostalgias of old age
by blue moon

The memories and nostalgias
of old age jostle or scream
or beguile or luridly wink
or sigh, and some recollections
one guzzles and some
one sips and savours
like a full-bodied wine…

I remember, today, picking grapes
at Hanwood, dreaming of escape.

O what sliding things,
what arrangements dancing
around the perimeters
when the mind no longer lingers
on linking patterns…freed.

As if on an Artaudian circular stage
on which the audience huddle
as the players play above
and all around in disarray
I huddle, memories and nostalgia
swirling…Antonin, you would love

this revolving, spectacular,
inarticulate rave set up in youth

not to be remembered but dismembered
for bemusement or torture…aaah.

if only we knew

Only from the distance does one
truly get lost in the moment

Lost in the moment.

and the wheel comes to a stop
today in Hanwood. Sharp-focussed
events turn to stills, linger.

She picks apples in Hanwood.
She thirsts for the fabulous
in a bright orange shirt
and a cloth hat that look’s
like a donkey’s, that girl I was
at thirteen.

[Guest]

revenants
by blue moon

On Radio National today
on All in the Mind
they talked about PTSD and then depression,
spoke of the types of memory involved
and of the pit where dwells repression.

of uncontrollable flashbacks
and rescripting, said to recognise those memories
intruding and place them in frames
and before they take shape to rescript them:
imagine an angel holding you hand
reassuring as you
stare at them upside down,
imagine them crumbling,
struck by lightning.
This is rescripting.
Chasing the pain.
On radio national today.

There was a girl with terrible memories.
From the hand of her father
her mother died beside her, and she wiped
the blood from her nose and ears
and then tended the wrists of her father.
By his father in turn she was raped
and she wasn’t yet nine years old.

They used to think ptsd
was only a product of trenches.

they interviewed the girl.
She is old now. She sounded warm
and nice. She overcame and led a full life.
She said life is shaped by what you think about
all day long, and by the memories you cling to.

Let go of the baggage.
Let the rescripting begin, and memory
realign, cool and crisp as the
waiting page.

[Guest]

Artaudian

Spinetta (I've been posting his songs in the rock section) has an album called Artaud in reference of Antonin Artaud. They say it's probably his best album. I'll post a couple of songs there now.


I love reading what you wrote despite my limitations

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