Yum!

Happy V Day people :) And thank you to a very special someone for cooking me up this delicious surprise... xx

A litte word from John Donne's Epithalamion - 

'...This day more cheerfully than ever shine
This day which might inflame thy selfe old Valentine.'

The first step

I was excited after reading The Poetry Lesson because it meant I got to choose the magnificent Greek Constantine P Cavafy as my Ghost Companion. Andrei Codrescu's method is already working for me - opened up C.P. Cavafy Collected Poems and landed on this one. Aah the synchronicity....

THE FIRST STEP

The young poet Evmenis
complained one day to Theocritos:
“I have been writing for two years now
and I have composed just one idyll.
It’s my only completed work.
I see, sadly, that the ladder of Poetry
is tall, extremely tall;
and from this first step I now stand on
I will never climb any higher.”
Theocritos replied: “Words like that
are improper, blasphemous.
Just to be on the first step
should make you happy and proud.
To have come this far is no small achievement:
what you have done is a glorious thing.
Even this first step
is a long way above the ordinary world.
To stand on this step
you must be in your own right
a member of the city of ideas.
And it is a hard, unusual thing
to be enrolled as a citizen of that city.
Its councils are full of Legislators
no charlatan can fool.
To have come this far is no small achievement:
what you have done already is a glorious thing.” 

The Poetry Lesson

Just finished reading this book and loved it - The Poetry Lesson by Andrei Codrescu. 
I don't do reviews but if you enjoy poetry, have a curious nature and a sense of humour, give it a go. The back cover blurb sums it up beautifully. 'The Poetry Lesson is a must-have manual for poetry monsters; a book of caveats for the peddlers of "creative" snake oil; an archaeo-psychological scan of instantly obsolete technology; the memoir of a professor reluctantly abandoning his sex fantasies; the collected portrait of deluded youth about how to find out something horrific; an affectionate treatise on poetry as a cure for hubris; and a de profundis moan of flesh turning into fortune cookies.'
I'm trying out some of his methods. More on that later but for now how's this little gem:
Did you know that John Keats' grave isn't marked with his name? There's an epitaph, but no name. Alongside him is buried Joseph Severn and Joe's tombstone notes that he is 'the friend of John Keats, the poet buried next to him'. 
Which is a kind of poetry in itself.

Hope 2011

Expanding on a snippet from the Sydney Festival event tonight, Festival Keynote: Hope 2011 - Stories That Must Be Told. MC Wendy Harmer quoted a line from Emily Dickinson's poem 254, oft referred to as Hope is the thing with feathers. 

Dickinson is a RubyfireWrites favourite, so here it is for you...

'Hope' is the thing with feathers
That perches in the soul,
And sings the tune without the words,
And never stops at all,

And sweetest in the gale is heard;
And sore must be the storm
That could abash the little Bird
That kept so many warm.

I've heard it in the chillest land
And on the strangest sea;
Yet, never, in extremity,
It asked a crumb of me. 

11.1.11

In acknowledgement of today's palindromic date - 11/1/11 - I give you a palindromic poem. Listen all the way to the end to see how the poem reverses on itself and ends where it began. Super clever!

Woo-hoo...it's Saturday!

I love Saturdays. Especially the fireworks. 
Those in the know say that Saturday was named in the second century for the planet Saturn - dies Saturni - which controlled the first hour of that day according to the Hellenistic astrologer Vettius Valens. 
In Scandinavian countries Saturday is called lördag, lørdag, or laurdag, meaning 'bath day', derived from the Viking tradition of bathing on Saturday.
Meanwhile, across the seas and in the southern hemisphere on Saturdays the Maoris were doing their washing. They call it rahoroi or haterai, named for the day they washed their whites for church on Sunday.
If you give birth today, the folk rhyme Monday's Child prophesies that your baby will grow to 'work hard for a living'. 
And if you happen to read a good book today, your world will be richer for it. Have a great day.

Scot's honour

A note on the song many drunken voices shall no doubt be singing as the clock ticks over midnight tonight...words which have always been assumed to have come from the pen of my grandfather's favourite poet, Robert Burns (1759-1796).
Burns contributed the song to James Thomson's Scots Musical Museum, writing to Thomson in 1793 that it was in fact 'the old song of olden times, and which has never been in print, nor even in manuscript, until I took it down from an old man's singing'.
However... experts believe there's evidence of Robbie Burns himself within those words and that he may have been exhibiting his own playful humour in the telling, particularly after he wrote this note accompanying the poem to his patron, Mrs Frances Dunlop, in 1788:
'Light be the turf on the breast of the Heaven-inspired poet who composed this glorious fragment. There is more fire of native genius in it than in half a dozen Modern English Bacchanalians.'


Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And never brought to min'?
Should auld acquaintance be forgot,
And auld lang syne?


For auld lang syne, my dear.
For auld lang syne,
We'll take a cup o' kindness yet,
For auld lang syne.


And a cup of kindness to you this new year's eve, thanks for reading.

Pick a peck of poetry

Some cool pieces on poetry I've come across lately on the web:
Big Other celebrated its very own Wallace Stevens week, publishing a series of posts from the author of the wonderful Thirteen Ways Of Looking At A Blackbird. There's about 20 posts dated 15-19 November 2010, well worth a look.
Travel writer Jeffrey Taylor ponders life and travel and the meaning of existence as seen through the mind of the Greek poet Cavafy (pictured above)in his Journey to Ithaca.
For a cerebral workout take a look at Joseph Epstein on TS Eliot and the Demise of the Literary Culture. (Eliot pictured with his second wife Valerie at the theatre in Chicago, 1959.)
And if you have any brain space left after all that, if you haven't already met him, let me introduce you to Georgian poet Titsian Tabidze (as described by his relatives). He was something of a literary revolutionary with a talent for upsetting the establishment which led to his eventual execution during the purge of Georgian intellectuals in 1937. A bit of history and intrigue for a Monday night in. Enjoy.

The poet and the prisoner

The last word, for now, on The Paris Review. Check out this issue - No 182 Fall 2007 - with an interview on The Art of Poetry with American poet August Kleinzahler (who appeared at the Melbourne Writers Festival this year) and an eye-popping exposé of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar (pictured above with his wife Victoria Henao in the 1980s). 
The Kleinzahler piece - besides being a fascinating insight into the razor sharp mind of a successful contemporary poet and writer of prose, essays, short stories - is pretty funny. He doesn't hold back, to the point where the interviewer comments on his 'gift for vitriol'. Check out this manuscript page from his poem Retard Spoilage (above). Incidentally, he notes Australian short story writer Helen Garner as one of his favourite writers.
You can read the Kleinzahler article here. Escobar, as with his trade, comes at a price...

More from The Paris Review...

Another gem from The Paris Review, this time from No 116, Fall 1990: an interview with Mario Vargas Llosa shortly after he bowed out of the Peruvian election race that same year. You can read a transcript online here. In 2010 he was the recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature.
So who does a Nobel Prize winner read?
He reads William Faulkner: 
'Faulkner was the first novelist I read with pen and paper in hand, because his technique stunned me. He was the first novelist whose work I consciously tried to reconstruct by attempting to trace, for example, the organization of time, the intersection of time and place, the breaks in the narrative, and that ability he has of telling a story from different points of view in order to create a certain ambiguity, to give it added depth.'
Jorge Luis Borges:
'Borges, because the world he creates seems to me to be absolutely original. Aside from his enormous originality, he is also endowed with a tremendous imagination and culture that are expressly his own. And then of course there is the language of Borges, which in a sense broke with our tradition and opened a new one.... He is the only writer in the Spanish language who has almost as many ideas as he has words. He’s one of the great writers of our time.'
Pablo Neruda:
'Pablo Neruda is an extraordinary poet. ...Neruda adored life. He was wild about everything—painting, art in general, books, rare editions, food, drink. Eating and drinking were almost a mystical experience for him. A wonderfully likable man, full of vitality — if you forget his poems in praise of Stalin, of course. 
'Neruda comes out of the Jorge Amado and Rafael Alberti tradition that says literature is generated by a sensual experience of life.'
And Octavio Paz: 
'Not only a great poet, but a great essayist, a man who is articulate about politics, art, and literature. His curiosity is universal.'
Llosa goes on to talk at length about his inspiration, process and technique, his language, his politics and his success...
'I think my greatest quality is my perseverance: I’m capable of working extremely hard and getting more out of myself than I thought was possible. My greatest fault, I think, is my lack of confidence, which torments me enormously. It takes me three or four years to write a novel — and I spend a good part of that time doubting myself. It doesn’t get any better with time; on the contrary, I think I’m getting more self-critical and less confident.' 
The interview was recorded 20 years ago, one hopes the Nobel has settled his self-doubt once and for all...
Check out the manuscript page from Llosa's 1988 novel In Praise of the Stepmother (above, click on image to enlarge).

Archived treasures

Love this 1966 edition of The Paris Review (No 39) I found in a secondhand book stall in New York a couple of years ago. 
Great cover art and scratchy thick textured pages. And look how fantastic the line-up is on the contents page! The letters of ee.cummings to Ezra Pound, an interview with Harold Pinter and poetry by Pablo Neruda - all published while they were not only alive and kicking but still writing new material. 
The magazine is still going strong today but it's fascinating to see who has contributed to past editions. Back issues, from as early as No 7 published in 1954, are still available via the website. I'd love to get my hands on that one - with illustrations by Picasso and Warhol - going for US$100, or No 28 1962 featuring an interview with Pound and fiction by Samuel Beckett and Jorge Luis Borges for US$80...
For now I'll content myself with reading the magazine's regular Art of Fiction series online via the Archive section (1953 onwards) which includes such contributors as Ernest Hemingway, Graham Greene, E.M. Forster and a myriad of other greats.

Slow burning poetry...

How exciting! Picked up a copy of the latest issue of Heat magazine in the bookstore at the Museum of Contemporary Art today and found within it a poem written by the very talented husband of the very talented Birdie who created the new artwork for Rubyfire Writes (click here for a sneak preview - of the artwork, not the poem). 
Craig Billingham has already published one volume of poetry - his 2007 debut collection Storytelling - and is working on his second. 
Heat 23 features one of his new works, Poem With Ocean Views.
Craig is in esteemed company here, sharing mag space with the indescribably wonderful Anthony Lawrence. No, I can't even begin to tell you how wonderful Lawrence is.
Get your copy of Heat here. Do it, do it!

Happy birthday blog!

It's your very first birthday - whoop whoop! To celebrate, Blog, you get.... a facelift! I know * sigh * they start so young these days.

Did a little digging around to see what other auspicious literary occasions occurred on 18 October and this is what I found:

1831: William Blake's wife Catherine died at their house in Fitzroy Square, four years after his death. She reportedly 'called continuously to her William, as if he were in the next room, to say she was coming to him and would not be long now'...

1855: Franz Liszt's Prometheus premiered. Yes it's music but he composed it as a 'symphonic poem' - a piece of orchestral music in which the content of a poem is evoked - based on the Greek myth Prometheus.

1859: Henri Bergson was born, French philosopher and recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1927) for The Creative Evolution. Bergson must have had an eye for literary genes, he married a cousin of Marcel Proust.

1869: Henrik Ibsen's De Ungers Forbund (The League of Youth) premiered in Christiania, the city now known as Oslo. The story of a young political idealist who mounts an election campaign in a small Norwegian town became one of Norway's most popular comedic 19th century plays.

1910: E.M. Forster published Howard's End, the classic tale of class conflicts in Edwardian England, considered along with Passage to India to be his finest work.

1967: Walt Disney releases the animated film based on Rudyard Kipling's The Jungle Book.

So for a birthday wish, a few lines from Blake, who believed that a bigger force than himself worked through him. He held the pen, the graver or the brush. He was its agent, never its master, the possessed rather than the possessor... 

Eternity

He who binds to himself a joy

Does the winged life destroy;

But he who kisses the joy as it flies

Lives in eternity's sun rise.

  - William Blake

Picture courtesy of artist Madeleine Stamer at Little Birdsville.

Farewell La Stupenda

A small note on the passing of a monumental talent. 
Dame Joan Sutherland has died. 
Pavarotti once called Dame Joan 'the voice of the century' and Montserrat Caballé described her voice as being 'like heaven'.
As the SMH reports today: 'Her influence extended well beyond the opera world and reached into popular culture.'
I never heard her sing on stage, but even to a kid like me growing up in 1970s'/80s' Australia, Joan Sutherland was larger than life. 
In fourth class at school we were required to write a poem about what we wanted to be when we grew up. I distinctly remember my first verse. 
With apologies to Dame Joan, who shall be lauded in far worthier encomiums than this, herewith the tribute from my then-nine-year-old self...:


I'd like to sing the opera
Performing every night
Dressing up and singing songs
For everyone's delight.
Like Joan Sutherland, 
she has a lovely voice
Only I would be thinner, 
if I had a choice.


Vale La Stupenda.

Vintage mags from Comptoir de L'image

More from the fabulous Comptoir de L'image... Besides the beat poets I found two brilliant cultural icons from my youth...
A stack of Interview magazines and an equally impressive trove of vintage Vogue.
Interview coloured our lives in my teens - took my friend T and I out of boarding school bounds and into the exotic world of 1980s American art, film, fashion, music, culture - Isabella Rossellini, Andy Warhol, Lou Reed, Cyndi Lauper - the cover art was always fantastic and so different from the drudgery of Dolly and friends on the shelves at the good ole Wahroonga Franklins...
And then there was Vogue.... there's something about the vintage editions that lifts them to a time so much more glamorous than the current. Maybe it's the original artwork, the timelessness of the models and Hollywood icons of old school cinema, the lack of ads and mass consumer chain store rip offs...
Resisted the temptation to lug them all home but did content myself with a cover print from French Vogue, 1 June 1921... I wonder if, in 90 years' time, someone will hang the Oct 2010 cover on their wall?

Synchronicity... oui!

Some may call it coincidence but I say it's synchronicity all the way... I've mentioned it a few times here - 5 February On Rivers comes to mind. So sit back and enjoy this tale of synchronicity and serendipity...

On the 10th of June 2010 I came across a photographic exhibition that was on in Washington DC - Allan Ginsberg's personal snapshots of his beat poet friends. Wow, I would have loved to have seen that.

On the 27th of June, planning a then-imminent trip to France, I blogged about a second hand bookstore Comptoir de l'image that was on my 'non-negotiable drop-ins' list for Paris.

On the 17th of July I walked into said bookstore and the first, the first, book I saw sitting on top of a pile waist high blocking my tracks was:..... the book from the Ginsberg exhibition! Aah... It had my name written all over it. 

So here it is. And what a find. The photos are a fascinating - somewhat voyeuristic - insight into the lives of the beat poets. (Yes that is Lou Reed, second photo from top, left.) Love the handwritten captions beneath each image too. And of course, there's Jack.

Poets pushing product

After recently discovering a virtual library of famous dead people reciting their classic works on the web, I see now that Levi's has taken a literary tack in its new ad campaign across the USA. 
It's a stretch but if it spawns a new generation of poetry enthusiasts it can't hurt. The Go Forth ads claim to appeal to the 'smarts and heritage' of the American people and feature dubbed audio of Walt Whitman reciting his famous poem Oh Pioneers! You can check out the ads here and here.
Makes me wonder what the Australian market might stomach? The Banjo pushing Bega Cheese...? Perhaps a bit of Dorothea MacKellar selling sunscreen...? 
I reckon A.D. Hope could have been put to great creative exposure in the recent federal election campaign. Would have made it worth listening to anyway - and we might have even gotten a winner.

Why poetry is cool

Came across this image taken by Steve McLaughlin in Montreal on the LRB blog. 
Literary graffiti - love it!

'I found words to console me, they call it "poetry".' So true.

McLaughlin is bussing it around America and Canada interviewing 'semi-prominent figures in experimental, or semi-experimental, poetry' for a series of podcasts. Read all about it here.

Hello spring

Sunset from my balcony on the first day of Spring. And a poem by Emily Dickinson...

A little madness in the Spring

Is wholesome even for the King,

But God be with the Clown - 

Who ponders this tremendous scene - 

This whole experiment of Green - 

As if it were his own!