Dream (Blue)

"I must have been asleep when you went out
One luminous night, when stars all about
Shone plaintive in the silent evening air -
I see it in my mind like I was there.

It's just like you to pick the perfect scene:
The lighting was just right, the moon serene
And slightly mournful, distant, cold and bare -
I see it in my mind like I was there.

Your gown floating ethereal like some
Dream of a scene a painter had once come
Upon while reading Shakespeare, icy fair -
I see it in my mind like I was there.

Now it's a ritual, now it's a cry,
Now life-affirming leap into the sky's
Reflection, now a whimper of despair -
I see it in my mind like I was there.

And down, down, through the misty mirror, down
To where the reeds ensnared a loving crown
That held you from me, gently stroked your hair -
I see it in my mind like I was there.

It's far too cold for you, your skin is pale
And far too cold, your eyes a glassy veil -
They sparkled stream-blue when you used to care;
I see it in my mind like I was there.

Your tragic tableau haunts me like a scream.
You spread your arms wide, waking from a dream
You felt some fondess for, but couldn't bear -
I see it in my mind like I was there."

Background

This is the first poem I wrote in the Dream cycle thing I'm doing. I wrote it just before going away to uni in a bid to have something to read at a poetry group.

Note the whole thing being in quotation marks - it's because it's a character talking. I picture him as an obsessed literary critic and probably amateur dramatist. He might be the same person as in Red Dream, I don't know.

Technically

This is me working up to a villanelle, pretty much. Also, it's really not my normal voice - for one thing, in my accent air/there don't rhyme (though to be honest I don't usually write fear/there etc. unless I'm making a point, because no-one would understand me). It and Red Dream are probably my favourite things I've done. There might be another Dream to round them off, I haven't decided if I'm going to share it.

I wrote it at around four in the morning (like almost everything) and ended up with four or five too many stanzas, which I duly replaced or removed. The joys of an open form, eh... I like the way that this seven-stanza version centres on the fourth stanza, which is really the pivot the whole thing rests on. 

(They weren't very good, if you're wondering. I don't know, I would be. There was a bit about her counting steps in her head before she gets to the bank, which it was a shame to lose, but ruthless editing is often necessary.)

Links

Hmm... I picture the scene the lover is recreating as rather Ophelia-like (a rather large JPEG of the Millais painting, which is of course much too green for the poem, but you know), as befits the dramatic thing.

Talking of ruthless editing, and hoping to avoid a thunderbolt from the literary gods for even implying a comparison, T. S. Eliot's original version of The Waste Land was much longer, and it was only with his editor Ezra Pound's advice that he cut it down - it's dedicated to him with il miglior fabbro (the better craftsman - a Dante reference) underneath. The link is to an online version of the text with Eliot's questionably helpful notes as well.

Dream (Red)

She walks the streets in dreams she read,
My love, a sweet song on her lips,
And all the love-sick skies fall dead.

I heard the whisper-things she said
As I lay in my sleep-eclipse:
She walks the streets in dreams she read.

Her shawl won't billow fiery red
Except for when my memory slips
And all the love-sick skies fall dead.

But in her wake the shadows fled
And hid like lurking deep-wrecked ships.
She walks the streets in dreams she read.

She follows where her story led -
The fairy footpath bucks and dips
And all the love-sick skies fall dead.

And I await her in her bed
While in my dream the candle drips:
She walks the streets in dreams she read
And all the love-sick skies fall dead.

Background

This poem is part of a series of Dream poems I wrote around the end of last year. In case you're wondering, the she in the poem isn't actually anyone. Well, I don't think so, anyway, probably more of a composite - you might have noticed that I haven't dedicated this poem to anyone. It's one of my favourites of the things that I've done.

Technically

This is the first villanelle I wrote which actually worked, in my opinion. The way a villanelle works is like this:

AbÀ abA abÀ abA abÀ abAÀ

That is, there are two rhymes (a and b) and two repeating lines which rhyme with the first set (A and À), usually called refrains. The structure is always as I've shown it above - a series of five three-line stanzas (tercets being the technical name - triplet implies they all rhyme together) in which the first establishes the two refrains and the remaining ones alternate between them - historically, the usual metre was iambic tetrameter, but mostly people use pentameter now. Finally a quatrain ending in both refrains together gives some kind of resolution.

Writing in forms usually involves constraints - saying what you want to say within a fixed number of syllables to the line, within a certain rhyme scheme, within a limited number of lines and stanzas. The villanelle effectively takes these constraints and turns them up to eleven, making you expound your vision with the constant interruption of some lines from earlier (that you have to make sense of in a variety of contexts) inside two sodding rhymes. I mean, pick "I found inside a Spanish orange / A tiny man, whose name was Gorringe" and you're pretty well sunk.

Given the ridiculously tight constraints of the villanelle (next to the old dressing gown of the ode and the skinny jeans of the sonnet it's practically one of those corsets that squashes the air out of your chest and your chest into a shape that's probably not much good for your internal organs) you might wonder why you'd bother at all with something so fussy - but instead of trying to convince you by rambling on about the dream-like or obsessive quality the repetition can produce, or the sense of satisfaction of seeing the two squabbling refrains finally end up together after exploring every permutation of being apart, I'm just going to reproduce my favourite villanelle, possibly my favourite poem and certainly one of the best examples of the form.

"I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead;
I lift my lids and all is born again.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

The stars go waltzing out in blue and red,
And arbitrary blackness gallops in:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I dreamed that you bewitched me into bed
And sung me moon-struck, kissed me quite insane.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

God topples from the sky, hell's fires fade:
Exit seraphim and Satan's men:
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.

I fancied you'd return the way you said,
But I grow old and I forget your name.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)

I should have loved a thunderbird instead;
At least when spring comes they roar back again.
I shut my eyes and all the world drops dead.
(I think I made you up inside my head.)"

Links

That was "Mad Girl's Love Song" by Sylvia Plath. I found it here. It is a rare thing to be able to turn anguish into such beautiful and timeless lines without somehow trivialising it (I think).

The other great example of the villanelle, for my money, is "Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night" by Dylan Thomas. Where Sylvia Plath's piece shows obsession and heartbreak with searing clarity, Dylan Thomas (with no less emotional charge) explores the grammatical acrobatics and progressing thought process - unlike Plath's repeated, tortured whimper "(I think I made you up inside my head.)" his second refrain "Rage, rage against the dying of the light" fires the poem forward.

Or at least I think so. I'm worried that doing a literature degree is turning me into a literary critic. Ugh. Maybe I'm just out of practice at this whole blog thing. Anyway, I expect I'm going to talk more about the Dream theme when I post the other poems in it.

I thought it'd be more useful not to link to Wikipedia again (I assume you'll have a look at the page on villanelles if you're interested), so I'm linking to this ebook on them (called "Refrain Again: The Return of the Villanelle", by Amanda French), specifically the section on the form's history. For the record, there are far more modern English examples than Medieval French ones, regardless of how lazy textbook writers like to describe it as a revived Medieval form.

Oh, it's nice to be back.

I'm back to save the universe

Yeah, I'm back. I've not been particularly away, and I still have parts of my initial stash of poems and plans to inflict on the world, so there's still a fair bit that wants doing. I suppose I've been playing and writing for guitar more than writing blog posts and such recently - who knows, if I can record to a standard I like I might post. Anyway, I'll probably do one or two and then bugger off back into the night, so put up with it while you can.


An interstellar burst, I'm glad to say...

Love and Squalor

Emptiness, the cancer of too much thinking,
settles like a poisonous slumber, cloying
sourness of the graven and grave. My only
thoughts are of nothing.


Dead men, words and name in eternal memory,
loom like God Himself in my head, far distant.
I can never equal their sainted actions
writ in the heavens.


Step into the air, feel the wind and thunder
rage against you. Rage in return, and know then:
they are dead, and you still can taste the sunlight,
screaming out I AM!


for Esmé, of course


Background


This is a poem I wrote after a conversation with one of my friends. I don't tend to like the poems where I'm deciding or explaining what I think that much, but this one isn't too bad. It's also the first poem I wrote at uni.


Technically


This is a trio of Sapphic stanzas, usually just called Sapphics. Sappho was a Greek poetess from the island of Lesbos (she occasionally wrote poems praising female beauty, hence the terms Sapphic and lesbian) who either invented or popularised the stanza, which goes like this:



Tróchee, tróchee, dáctyl and twó more tróchees
Sáme twice móre, you knów where you áre with wríting
Sápphics: Threé of thése ones and thén the fínal
Clósing Adónic.


(Apologies for the awfulness of that. It served a purpose...)
(If you didn't see the hexameter post, a troche goes LONG-short (like its name), and a dactyl goes LONG-short-short (its name in Greek was dáktylos, which does go like that), and there are some other ones which aren't as necessary here.)

You might also remember the Adonic, which I promised to bring up here again. As well as being in the final line of a Sapphic (though originally the sense and often the word itself would spill over from the previous line), the Adonic is at the heart of each of the three longer lines:



So the goddess fled from her place, with awful
Sound of feet and thunder of wings around her;
While behind a clamour of singing women
Severed the twilight.


Like in hexameter, it propels the line forward invisibly, like an engine.


But look at that last line again:
... it propéls the line fórward ...


It's not just found in verse. If you start listening out for it, you'll hear people often tálk in Adónics, and a lot of prose (like speeches) which are claimed to have "good rhythm" often use thís kind of páttern to talk in.


Another rhythmic tic is the choriamb (Greek for "trochee iamb", which is the same as an Adonic but without the last short syllable - sómething like thís. It comes up in the King James Bible a fair bit (if you hear it read that sort of thing comes out noticeably - haven't got any cóncrete exámples here).


Generally, metre is everywhere. I'll probably do a post about this at some point.


Links


The title is a pitiful reference to "For Esmé - With Love And Squalor" by J. D. Salinger.


The Sapphic is from the Wikipedia page, apparently by Algernon Charles Swinburne.

Statues - Seasons

(I asks what the trees dream of)


The leaves that they have cherished now fall down
Into a gently rotting golden veil
Which we draw over long and lazy days
And nights.
                         The sky is cloud-covered and stale,
As much as summer with its dying rays
Draws people out to bask while they still can
Like wasps, who always know when their time’s done,
And numb themselves accordingly.
                                                                       The span
Of ripeness given by the earth has come
And gone, by now the over-softened fruit
Lies festering, alive and waiting for
The frost to come and sterilise it –
                                                                     Moot
Whether the tiny lives on Warden’s Lawn^*
Approve of their impending vanishing;




But when the freezing comes there’s no such thing
As wondering if it was such a good
Idea to stay around, unlike the birds,
Whose hasty exit’s waved and understood
By John’s^* skeletal hands.
                                                     And all the words
They cry back will unfreeze on the cold air
In time, and when the sap stopped in the veins
Of every tree has thawed, they will prepare
To answer, in a dialogue it pains
Them to continue, age after slow age.


For now, though, in suspended animation
The sun shines weakly, watery, the page
Of Nature turned, though every new creation
Will still insist on turning out the same;




And suddenly, though you might think the flame
Of frozen winter, scorching the land cold
And barren to the eye, might never yield,


The last frost breaks. The sun shines strong and gold.
The world awakes. The creatures in the field
Forsake their lairs. The birds who had escaped
Come back with airs – Of course they couldn’t stay
Away from Meads^*! Who else would coo and prate
While some disease holds people in Sick Bay?


The freshest time of year, this, when the dawn
Smells all of growing, and the rain feels clean
On my face as I stand on Cat’s^*, forlorn
That it was cloudy when the sun rose, keen
To feel how shifting seasons’ winds are changing;




And now the sun looks on us, his gaze ranging
From tennis to exams sat in the dark.


At least, whenever he chooses to shine
On us, we can enjoy his warmth… The spark
That ignites the full summer comes in time
Some years, and others not – but that makes when
It does more special.
                                           Hot days come alive
And leisurely, relaxing Collegemen^*
Pretend to read, propped up against the hive
Of stones that exhale heat they’ve held for months,
And breathe in once again to arm themselves.


They feel the cooling coming, in amongst
The balmy breezes there’s a chill. It delves
Into the trees’ bark, tints their green with brown;




Warden's Lawn: A walled lawn in College, my boarding house at the time
John: The name given to one of the four huge trees on Meads (see below), which were named after the Evangelists.
Meads: The bigger lawn-type area just out of College, which had a football and cricket pitch on it.
Cat's: A hill crucially away from the school (though still owned by it) where I used to walk
Collegemen: The term for people from College.


Background


In the last year of school I decided to enter my house's creative writing competition. (I'm afraid I went to the type of school which has boarding houses and furniture older than Australia and tiresome Latin-based slang, not that you'd be able to tell by my faux-erudite style and Classics fixation.) To this end, I wrote a sonnet cycle based around College (my house), initially focusing on individual places, then moving on to wider topics, such as the seasons, as reproduced here. It didn't win anything, for one reason or another, but I'm proud of it as the first major-ish thing I've completed in a while. The only problem with it is that it's all by its nature rather College-specific; luckily the part I like the most is also the most generally appreciable (with the given notes), so there you are. The italicised parenthesis at the top is what carries over from the previous poem in the cycle. (I, by the way, is my convention for the narrator in my poems - probably not a coherent character.)


Technically


If it interests anyone, I wrote the sonnet cycle as a "big sonnet" - fourteen poems arranged into three quatrains and a volta. These four make up the third big quatrain. Whereas everywhere else in the cycle the poems are standard Shakespearian sonnets, here I went first for a cyclic rhyme scheme, as befits a seasonal description, and then broke with end-stopping quatrains - the sense flows on through line, stanza and even poem boundaries. This made the rhyming a lot easier... In general I try to make my rhymes as exact as possible, but in the context of a larger project like Statues or even in this sub-cycle I relaxed this a bit. It also meant I could get into building in themes and motifs - see if you can spot a Greek element in each season, for example. (That one wasn't deliberate, but there were a lot that were - and besides, if you do it by accident and leave it in, it becomes deliberate...)


Oh, and the metre's iambic pentameter. It's the first example I've posted here, but really my - and most of English formal verse's - default metre. On a small note, if you've got iambic pentameter down as five iambs in a line (random line, The fré|shest tíme | of yeár, | this, whén | the dáwn), you might be puzzled to see lines like "And nów the sún looks ón us, hís gaze ránging", which has an extra syllable at the end. It's called a feminine line (a term borrowed from French verse, where all feminine forms end in Es, giving an extra weak syllable as opposed to the masculine, of which make what you will), and can be used for metrical and rhyme variation in English, or more consistently in French and Russian verse, for example, where it's customary for masculine (hít/bít) and feminine (eáting/beáting) rhyming pairs to alternate. Look, Shakespeare does it! "To bé or nót to bé, that ís the quéstion." (Whether the stresses actually fall like that in real life is the subject for another post - but you get the idea for now.)


Links


Certainly not to the rest of Statues. You can probably find it online if you look hard enough - but then, you've brought it on yourself, and I'll not accept any resulting blame.


The linking sonnet thing is reminiscent of a corona (Latin for "crown"), a sort of sonnet daisy chain where the entire first and last lines are the same as the previous and next ones - sometimes people even make the last one up using all the repeated lines. John Donne did one in his later God phase called La Corona, detailing and praising the progress of Christ in a crown of seven sonnets. I personally prefer the earlier love poems, but that probably says more about me than Donne (said as Done - he once summed up his prospects to his wife in a letter with, "John Donne, Anne Donne, Undone").

Spring

Blooming feelings pushed her on,
They bound her in them and the one
She wanted, new life in her breast;
She thought she'd torn it from her chest.


No-one spoke as she ran out,
The bloom of beauty plucked, her shout
Was swallowed in the morning air -
When they looked there was no-one there.


His arms' warmth coursed through every vein,
Her old wound's scar felt new again.
The sun drew halos in her hair
And green shoots sprang up everywhere.


for S


Background


Originally there were only the first two verses, which I found in a notebook I wrote in for a while. I wanted to record another song (after Silence), and I came across this and thought it might work. I sent it to my friend S, who wanted to know what happened next, and so I resolved it in a third verse. It's one of my favourite poems I've done, certainly of my songs. (It's happy, for a start, even if only on external cajoling...)


Technically


Still long ballad metre, like Silence, though the first lines of the first two verses have the initial weak syllable elided (known as acephalous lines, from the Greek for "headless"). When I write songs, generally, I can be a little freer with the metre (and simpler with the rhyme scheme) because it's accompanied. In fact, you almost get towards accentual-syllabic with some songs - but I'll save that for another post.


In case you're wondering, short ballad metre, or just ballad metre, is the classic tetrameter/trimeter pair as in "Becaúse I coúld not stóp for Deáth / He kíndly stópped for mé". Some people think that the original folk metre was seven iambs to a line (heptameter?), and then the normal pause in the line (caesura, Latin for "cut", pronounced siz-YOOR-uh if you're unsure) became strong enough to cut the line more or less in half permanently. In fact, reuniting the two halves is called writing in fourteeners, from the syllable count.


Links


Here's the rest of the Emily Dickinson poem


I recorded it with my brother playing guitar, it's on MySpace. I really like his guitar part, which he produced completely ignoring my direction, thank God. He said he was channelling Nick Drake, bastard that he is.

Death of the Author

So...


I thought it might be fun to write a blog post that isn't a poem, as this is a blog and all. And I was thinking about Death of the Author, which is probably one of the more pertinent things to mention on a blog where I've so far basically talked about my own poems a lot. (And it's not poetry. If it's poetry, then I'm a poet, which I'm not. Personally, I think you can't call yourself a -er unless you get regularly paid for -ing, which is why I'm not a writer either. Also, to my mind describing my stuff as "poetry" risks making me sound even more pretentious than I already do, which is a sickening thought.)


So, Death of the Author is a paper by Roland Barthes, who was apparently one of the more eminent literary critics of the last century. The idea is that the author's interpretation of the text is only as valuable as anyone else's - so really, what am I doing writing any of this at all... (Oh, and the title, from what I can tell, means the death of the idea of an Author (he doesn't even say "author", because it's too close to "authority", going for "scriptor" instead), rather than the idea that the author may as well have died as soon as they've written the story. But you get the idea.)


Barthes says that this frees texts (literary critics, even the good ones, have an unfortunate habit of reducing books to texts, which are books on an autopsy table) from the "tyranny" of interpretation, that is, one single interpretation; it also discounts the approach of examining the author's life and opinions to explain the text. (There I go... J. D. Salinger put, as the dedication for one of his books, "If there is an amateur reader still left in the world – or anybody who just reads and runs – I ask him or her, with untellable affection and gratitude, to split the dedication of this book four ways with my wife and children.")


How relevant background information should be is a tricky one. To a greater or lesser extent, all writing is autobiography - I can't remember where it's from (and I just spent ten minutes typing variations into Google and those depressing quotation databases), but someone said, "In their first novel everyone is either Jesus or Satan". The implication that you grow out of that phase with experience is valid, I suppose, but I doubt you ever escape it completely. How can you, if you see the world through your own eyes?


Ahem. Anyway, so there's always an element of the author (scriptor, writer, whatever) in the text, but you could say that that's only one part of it. Or that it's only one interpretation - like Barthes says, he's trying to get rid of the tyranny of one opinion, not the opinion itself. So in The Cherry Orchard, to take a random example, you could point out that Chekhov's family were forced to sell their house to a lodger, which could be the inspiration for the way that the Gayev family sell their estate and the cherry orchard to a former peasant from it, who then fells the orchard. Or you could say that the purchase and destruction of the cherry orchard by a former peasant represents the social upheaval and accompanying violent modernisation of Russia in the early 20th century. Chekhov's beautifully inconclusive writing supports any and no interpretation, thankfully.


This is why it's a bad idea to read the introductions to books, I suppose, especially "classics". For my money the way to read a book is to start at the beginning, move on through the middle, then stop at the end. By all means, if the book is difficult to understand (verbally, I mean, for example reading Shakespeare), have notes, but I think the problem with "classics" (I'm sorry for the sneer quotes, but I really can't take that label seriously - it's too close to trying to define objective value - a topic which may or may not appear in its own post at some point) is that they're seen to be conceptually difficult, which is often true. Thus you get introductions and explanatory notes, trying to explain what the author meant.


Well, I'm sure Barthes would have spat if he heard you trying to use what you think the author meant (or what the author has actually said they meant) to definitively limit the interpretation of the work. It's lazy on the reader's part and harmful on the publisher's to tell them what to think. Make up your own mind, instead of letting other people's opinions cloud yours. Or just read the introduction after...


That's kind of where my format for posting poems comes from: the poem is the first thing you see, and it's a lot bigger than the sub-rants because it's more important. If you want to hear what I was thinking about when I wrote it, it's there, as is the description of the way I wrote it, if that interests you. There's no compulsion to, I hope.


Take a recent example: I write a poem. (Sadly, it happens.) I want to show the poem to one of my friends. (Sadly, it happens. I'm putting them up here mostly so that I can talk about my poems at a text box instead of a long-suffering friend.) In the poem I describe kissing someone; my friend immediately asks me who the girl is.


It's missing the point. If I describe a kiss (Come to think of it, one of my friends did. I'll link at the end. It's heart-breakingly good.) the kiss stands alone, in as much detail as I've given it. If you needed to know the girl's full name (my, that'd be an interesting Facebook add) I'd have already given it. Wanting to be fed additional details to help you interpret the poem, novel, erotic limerick in three parts or whatever is approaching asking to be told what to think, which you should never, ever do because it's mental fucking suicide.


So yeah, Death of the Author: The author's opinion is not definitive. By all means take it into account, but it and the text (argh, you know what I mean) are separate. The text is the art part (and I'm really, really not going to go into what constitutes art, not even in a separate post (hint: the word comes from the Latin for 'skill') because how much more obnoxiously undergraduate can you get...) and the opinion is at best an informed commentary.


But please feel free to disagree...




Links


Here's Barthes' paper, so you can form your own opinion on it instead of blindly accepting mine, should you be so inclined. (Gosh, look what I did there...)


Here's the poem by my friend Hattie, who might crop up again around here. She's seriously good.


The J. D. Salinger book is Raise High the Roof Beam, Carpenters and Seymour: An Introduction. If you're going to read it (you can find it online if you're too cheap to buy) I would read the rest of Salinger's non-Catcher In the Rye stuff, because they're all linked, and just as good as Catcher, if not better (whisper it). It's as good a one to start with as any.