Light is the lion

The Glass of Water is another of Wallace Stevens’ poems that has buried itself into my gut, heart, and brain and taken root, slowly destroying and rebuilding me.

That’s a little dramatic perhaps, but Stevens’ poetry does tend to have something like this effect on me.

I’ve read The Glass of Water a few times now, and the moment that seems the most perfect to me is that where ‘light / is the lion that comes down to drink’. It’s so perfect because of its specificity (I think of a tongue come to lap the water, and of a golden coat and golden mane, of raw power, and of the ruddy features and frothy jaws as next described) and also its composit nature (it is all of these things at once).

The poem captures perfectly ‘the lion’s’ embroiled place in the metaphorical and metaphysical stratum that Stevens explores. It is the beast of thought, the ruddy power of any moment, the thirst to drink of and comprehend the meaning of each moment.

Stevens is the master of slowing down time to inspect its every composite part;  and the composite parts of objects and thoughts as they relate to each other and across time.

Here reproduced:

THE GLASS OF WATER

That the glass would melt in heat,
That the water would freeze in cold,
Shows that this object is merely a state,
One of many, between two poles. So,
In the metaphysical, there are these poles.

Here in the centre stands the glass. Light
Is the lion that comes down to drink. There
And in that state, the glass is a pool.
Ruddy are his eyes and ruddy are his claws
When light comes down to wet his frothy jaws

And in the water winding weeds move round.
And there and in another state–the refractions,
The metaphysica, the plastic parts of poems
Crash in the mind–But, fat Jocundus, worrying
About what stands here in the centre, not the glass,

But in the centre of our lives, this time, this day,
It is a state, this spring among the politicians
Playing cards. In a village of the indigenes,
One would have still to discover. Among the dogs and dung,
One would continue to contend with one’s ideas.

Is Christmas now?

NIN gear is probably unlikely.

What is much more likely, to the point of probably having already been put on order by significant persons in my life, are these two books:

I actually need Wallace Stevens right now. I don’t know why. It’s like the craving for a particular type of beer, a particular satisfying goodness… a really smooth treat.

Money for ink

Now that I have some spare time, I’m thinking about entering Fish Publishing‘s short story and / or one-page short story competition.

I couldn’t hope to win, but it would feel good to:

1. be creatively productive
2. put something out into the literary universe
3. incorporate an attendance at the ceremony, should a win actually occur, into next year’s European adventure.

I might leave the poetry alone.

It’s good to answer back

I already own and treasure two poetry collections by Carol Ann Duffy: Feminine Gospels and The World’s Wife. In the collection I bought today, Answering Back, Duffy takes up the role of editor (though also contributes the book’s final piece).

The woman is a genius and here she’s done something typically playful, simple, clever, but also delicately patterned and intricate…

She wrote to a number of contemporary poets with a simple request: Pick a poem from the past and respond to it in some way with a poem of your own.

So the collection is both a fine sampler of poetry from across the ages, as well as being distinctly contemporary in its perspective of looking back.

Although the different approach of each response means no perspective is quite the same as another – as Duffy outlines in the foreword, some poets have chosen “to subvert or to argue, some to play or to tease, some to echo or to transform, others to pay homage or to elegize.”

Appropriately, the collection begins with ‘Echo’ by Walter de la Mare, responded to by Dannie Abse.

A favourite so far (in the teasing category) is ‘Trowel’ in response to Allen Ginsberg’s ‘Howl’, where the best mind’s of Tony Curtis’s generation have now been destroyed by DIY.

Like living

I’ve been reading a bit of poetry of late, and I admit that the following epiphany (had while reading Wallace Stevens in the bath – bubbles – with a bit of moody Russian classical playing) may not be amazing or even make real sense, but it still stands and stands well, to my mind:

Reading poetry is like living. The comprehension processes, for me, are very similar. And that’s a lot of the reason why I like reading poetry.

Simple.

Here’s some of what has transported me of late (in-text links where possible, otherwise reproduced below):

• Howl, by Allen Ginsberg
• Rooms, by Gertrude Stein
• Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz, by Wallace Stevens.

Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz

Wallace Stevens

The truth is that there comes a time
When we can mourn no more over music
That is so much motionless sound.

There comes a time when the waltz
Is no longer a mode of desire, a mode
Of revealing desire and is empty of shadows.

Too many waltzes have ended. And then
There’s that mountain-minded Hoon,
For whom desire was never that of the waltz,

Who found all form and order in solitude,
For whom the shapes were never the figures of men.
Now, for him, his forms have vanished.

There is order in neither sea nor sun.
The shapes have lost their glistening.
There are these sudden mobs of men,

These sudden clouds of faces and arms,
An immense suppression, freed,
These voices crying without knowing for what,

Except to be happy, without knowing how,
Imposing forms they cannot describe,
Requiring order beyond their speech.

Too many waltzes have ended. Yet the shapes
For which the voices cry, these, too, may be
Modes of desire, modes of revealing desire.

Too many waltzes—The epic of disbelief
Blares oftener and soon, will soon be constant.
Some harmonious skeptic soon in a skeptical music

Will unite these figures of men and their shape
Will glisten again with motion, the music
Will be motion and full of shadows.

A grip on me

Yes, although for no solid reason, here is a poem that has truly gripped me:

MALACHITE

The sudden spoon is the same in no size. The sudden spoon is the wound in the decision.

Pay attention. But not too much or too little.

And still, significantly: WHY WHY WHY WHY?

Gertrude Stein, and Tender Buttons especially, drives me mad like never before.

DAMN HER. LOVE HER.

The mad, queer, subjective, privatising, cubist, weird-assed, love-able bitch.

Tender of Mutton

Gertrude Stein

This lady is a crazy genius. A self-proclaimed genius. But I’d back her up.

I recently read her book Tender Buttons (that’s a link to the full text online), published in 1914.

Often impenetrable, sometimes unexpectedly accessible. Somewhere between poetry and prose, the gnostic and the ordinary. Cheeky, sexy, philosophical, nonsensical, and playful…

If she doesn’t make you want to kill yourself, you’ll probably benefit from persevering with her.

My favourite Tender Buttons pieces at this point are the longer ones. Roast Beef, Mutton, and Rooms in particular. Can’t go past the short series of Potatoes though, nor for some reason A Substance in a Cushion.

Rhapsody on a Windy Night

I read this TS Eliot poem for the first, second, and third time last night. Seems it struck a chord with me…

Rhapsody on a Windy Night

Twelve o’clock.
Along the reaches of the street
Held in a lunar synthesis,
Whispering lunar incantations
Dissolve the floors of memory
And all its clear relations,
Its divisions and precisions,
Every street lamp that I pass
Beats like a fatalistic drum,
And through the spaces of the dark
Midnight shakes the memory
As a madman shakes a dead geranium.

Half-past one,
The street lamp sputtered,
The street lamp muttered,
The street lamp said, “Regard that woman
Who hesitates towards you in the light of the door
Which opens on her like a grin.
You see the border of her dress
Is torn and stained with sand,
And you see the corner of her eye
Twists like a crooked pin.”

The memory throws up high and dry
A crowd of twisted things;
A twisted branch upon the beach
Eaten smooth, and polished
As if the world gave up
The secret of its skeleton,
Stiff and white.
A broken spring in a factory yard,
Rust that clings to the form that the strength has left
Hard and curled and ready to snap.

Half-past two,
The street lamp said,
“Remark the cat which flattens itself in the gutter,
Slips out its tongue
And devours a morsel of rancid butter.”
So the hand of a child, automatic,
Slipped out and pocketed a toy that was running along the quay.
I could see nothing behind that child’s eye.
I have seen eyes in the street
Trying to peer through lighted shutters,
And a crab one afternoon in a pool,
An old crab with barnacles on his back,
Gripped the end of a stick which I held him.

Half-past three,
The lamp sputtered,
The lamp muttered in the dark.

The lamp hummed:
“Regard the moon,
La lune ne garde aucune rancune,
She winks a feeble eye,
She smiles into corners.
She smoothes the hair of the grass.
The moon has lost her memory.
A washed-out smallpox cracks her face,
Her hand twists a paper rose,
That smells of dust and old Cologne,
She is alone
With all the old nocturnal smells
That cross and cross across her brain.”
The reminiscence comes
Of sunless dry geraniums
And dust in crevices,
Smells of chestnuts in the streets,
And female smells in shuttered rooms,
And cigarettes in corridors
And cocktail smells in bars.

The lamp said,
“Four o’clock,
Here is the number on the door.
Memory!
You have the key,
The little lamp spreads a ring on the stair,
Mount.
The bed is open; the tooth-brush hangs on the wall,
Put your shoes at the door, sleep, prepare for life.”

The last twist of the knife.

Picks

From ‘In His Youth’ by Rhino:

• Send Off
• In His Youth
• Tide
• Madmen

Rhino delivers!

I got a lovely package from the talented Rhino today. It is a copy of his second collection of poetry, titled ‘In His Youth’. Published by Kilmog Press, an independent Dunedin label, the book is beautifully presented in hardback. Its design is entirely in tune with the content. Gorgeous to hold and to look at,  it is intimate and textured and begs to be read lovingly. Sound over the top? Well, it’s true.

Naturally, the poetry is also of a high quality, and shows a good progression from Rhino’s first collection, ‘Bird Heart’. BH, to my tastes, worked best in its simpler moments, and the pieces of IHY follow this vein. Not that the poems are simple. Oh no. But they are told with such beautiful economy of words that the depths of them wash over you before you realise you’ve been taken out with their tides.

I’d go into more depth about particular works and name some favourites, but I need to read the collection a few more times first.

Included in the package was a printed copy of a short story I’d sent Rhino, with some notes and suggestions mostly around improving aspects of tautology. Rhino, I’ve incorporated a number of your suggestions. Most satisfyingly, certain passages that had bugged me no longer do. Fresh eyes do see clearer. I thank you.