Montreal West train station, 1950s |
Thursday, January 18, 2024
"The Railway Station" by Archibald Lampman
Sunday, January 14, 2024
"What is it that a Poet Knows" by Louis Dudek
Louis Dudek |
What is it that a poet knows
that tells him 'this is real?'
Some revelation, a gift of sight,
granted through an effort of the mind
of infinite delight.
All the time I have been writing on the very edge of knowledge,
heard the real world whispering
with an indistinct and liquid rustling
as if to free, at last, an inextricable meaning!
Sought for words simpler, smoother, more clean than any,
only to clear the air
of an unnecessary obstruction
Not because I wanted to meddle with the unknown
(I do not believe for a moment that it can be done),
but because the visible world seemed to be waiting,
as it always is,
somehow, to be revealed
Thursday, January 11, 2024
Kathleen Raine on poetry and life
Kathleen Raine |
Kathleen Raine's Autobiographies (1991) is made up of her three earlier autobiographical books published in the mid-1970s. I always underline passages in books that I am reading and I underlined passages--single words, phrases, sentences, and paragraphs--in Raine's book; later, it occurred to me to compile some of these passages on this blog, these are passages that deal with poetry and being a poet. But typing out these passages today I was surprised at Raine's prescient references to the dark age in which we now live. This is even more pertinent today when the world of order and stability seems to be unraveling; the old order is passing away and the new order seems barbaric and chaotic, anarchic in its worst sense, and everywhere we see the disintegration of values, order, and stability. The barbarians are entering the city and we, the inhabitants, know they have no good intentions for us, they want to destroy us and everything we represent. At least, that is how it seems in the days post October 7th when terrorists invaded Israel intent on killing, mutilating, and raping women, and then celebrating and advertising their violence. But I digress from Kathleen Raine’s Autobiographies; it is a beautifully written book and it should be of interest to those who want to know more about Raine's life, poetry, and ideas about life.
29 December 2023
Kathleen Raine on poetry and life:
My mother did not send me to school until I was six years old; and if I have been a poet I owe it to my mother's protection of my sanctuary of solitude in those years of early childhood when three small fields between the advancing fringe of London's East-End suburbs, and the wooden fence of Dr. Bernardo's Homes was space enough for earthly Paradise. (p. 50)
Conversely, in order to escape the silent demands of dignified and beautiful proportions, barbarians must desecrate and violate, smash the stained glass and deface the statues and paint defiant slogans on walls that tell us too clearly, in their beauty and harmony of proportion, that we might be better than we are. (p, 120)
Strange (so it seems to me, writing in 1974 of my youth nearly fifty years ago) that the very premises of civilization should stand in need of defense. (p. 123)
Let me say here, since I use the term the 'soul' very often, that I am perfectly aware of the possible alternatives, such as psyche, brain, drive, complex, ego, and the behaviousistic terms . . . I believed in the soul as that specifically human life in us of which the body is the vehicle. It seemed then self-evident that this represents our 'higher' nature, and no less self-evident that what passes in that living consciousness--that being in us which we immediately feel to be our 'I am"--is of greater import than our physical functions. The experiences of the soul, for good or ill, I still supposed made up the matter of poetry; and indeed of all the arts, these being the expression and the record of the soul's knowledge. (p. 138-139)
But I have been able to speak from my heart only in my poems. (p. 325)
...--and I do not enjoy that dropping of barriers of the world where 'poets' (usually very minor ones, for any serious artist must live a life in some sense disciplined) move to a kind of promiscuous gregariousness. ... The poet must protect his wildness as best he may, with whatever, camouflage he can create; a principle inherited from the shy animal world from a millennial past. And for a poet whose theme was the city, the city, also must be his protective disguise. (p. 329)
Art is the city of the soul. (p. 339)
I can now myself say that I have learned nothing from experience, from my mistakes, from trial and error, or from the mere passage of time: only through rifts in these clouds, as if from another order of knowledge altogether. Tragedies, after all, however nobly enacted and grandly endured, are, as seen by wisdom, the storms of illusion, the webs woven in ignorance and passion by those who 'do but slenderly know themselves'. In tragedy we can finally admire only the grandeur of humanity's never abandoned struggle to attain the moment of transcendence; without which there can be no catharsis, no liberation. (p. 344)
Of all the teachers of my generation I am perhaps most indebted to Jung. ... for Jung points the way to a living access to the originals of which myths and symbols of religion are formulations. (p. 351)
In the generation before my own, T.S. Eliot remained within the tradition he would have wished to see continue; he, and David Jones, were perhaps the last poets of that tradition. Yeats saw the darkness approaching, the tide rising; but his hope lay not in any turning or stemming of the tide, but in that which lies beyond civilization, the mystery of the gyres, the Indian Brahman whose outbreathings create worlds and whose inbreathings withdraw them from existence. But Yeats too was still among the artificers of Byzantium, the Graeco-Christian civilization, preserved in Ireland beyond its time elsewhere. It is my generation which has seen the end. (p. 356)
The great tree is at this time showering down its leaves in a process of death which cannot be arrested, and whose record is everywhere to be read in the nihilism of the arts, of social life, in a thousand images of disintegration, in the reversion of civilized society, it may be, to a state of barbarism. (p. 356)
But since it has been above all poetic truth I have followed, tried to discover always that good, that best Socrates never ceased to speak of, poetic justice it must have been (the only kind I have ever acknowledged) that brought me at last to stand my judgement in Greece itself. (p. 357)
The poets are always blamed, more or less, for the same thing: they are ruthless, or that which drives them is. (p. 363)
Raine, Kathleen. Autobiographies. San Rafael, Coracle Press, 1991.
Tuesday, January 9, 2024
"A January Morning" by Archibald Lampman
Archibald Lampman |
The glittering roofs are still with frost; each worn
Black chimney builds into the quiet sky
Its curling pile to crumble silently,
Far out to westward, on the edge of morn,
Glimmer faint rose against the pallid blue;
And yonder, those northern hills, the hue
Of amethyst, hang fleeces dull as horn,
And here behind me come the woodman's sleighs
With shouts and clamorous squeakings; might and main
Up the steep slope the horses stamp and strain,
Urged on by hoarse-tongued drivers--cheeks ablaze,
Iced beards and frozen eyelids--team by team,
With frost-fringed flanks, and nostrils jetting steam.
Sunday, January 7, 2024
Saturday, January 6, 2024
Friday, January 5, 2024
"The Ship and Her Makers" by John Masefield
John Masefield, 1878-1967 |
Wednesday, January 3, 2024
"The Wood by the Sea" by Duncan Campbell Scott
In Ottawa |
I dwell in the wood that is dark and kind
But afar off tolls the main,
Afar, far off I hear the wind,
And the roving of the rain.
The shade is dark as a palmer's hood,
The air with balm is bland:
But I wish the trees that breathe in the wood
Were ashes in God's hand.
The pines are weary of holding nests,
Are aweary of casting shade;
Wearily smoulder the resin crests
In the pungent gloom of the glade.
Weary are all the birds of sleep,
The nests are weary of wings,
The whole wood yearns to the swaying deep,
The mother of restful things.
The wood is very old and still,
So still when the dead cones fall,
Near in the vale or away on the hill,
You can hear them one and all.
And their falling wearies me;
If mine were the will of God,–oh, then
The wood should tramp to the sounding sea,
Like a marching army of men!
But I dwell in the wood that is dark and kind,
Afar off tolls the main;
Afar, far off I hear the wind
And the roving of the rain.
Sunday, December 31, 2023
With music in the background
July 1974; Sally McKenzie and Pat McCarty walking to the tent where Krishnamurti gave his talks in Saanen, Switzerland |
From left: Pat McCarty, Sally McKenzie, and Stephen Morrissey: our last day at Saanen, 5 August 1974 |
Just after arriving in Saanen, Switzerland where Krishnamurti gave yearly talks, I met Patrick McCarty and Sally McKenzie; it was July 1974. That first evening at the hostel we walked to the Saanen Church to hear a concert; only recently I learned that we had attended an event of the Yehudi Menuhin Festival. Pat McCarty became a good friend. Two years later, in April 1976, we drove from Eureka, where he lived, to Baha California in Mexico; I met his brother and his wife and stayed with them in Oakland; I also met his parents, in Bakersfield. We visited San Diego, San Francisco and Los Angeles, we stayed at Yosemite National Park; we attended Krishnamurti's Talks at Ojai. Pat visited me in Montreal several times, including when I married in August 1976. Then life intervened and we lost touch and then, just a few years ago, I learned Pat had died in 2008.
As well, recently, I learned that Pat's birthday was January 21, 1947, the same birthday as my second wife. I have a theory regarding dates, probably not original to me, it is the synchronicity of dates, the meaningful coincidence of dates, especially births and deaths; dates can be a recognition of the importance of certain events or people important to us. When I met my second wife at Dorval Airport, in 1991, I felt that I had always known her and, looking back, I felt the same way about Pat McCarty; both born on January 21. The meaningful coincidence is their birthdate and that both of these people have helped fulfill my life; these are people who give more than they take.
Lucy Worsley is one of my favourite television personalities, she recently presented the life of Agatha Christie over three evenings. I've read all of Agatha Christie's novels, out loud to my wife, this was a daily time of togetherness made even more enjoyable by what we were reading; unfortunately, when our basement was flooded last summer all of our Agatha Christie novels were destroyed and had to be thrown out, they were all water damaged. Lucy Worsley mentioned that in her old age, when Christie was planning her funeral, she considered having Edward Elgar's Nimrod performed. Nimrod is a deeply moving memorial for Elgar's friend Augustus Jaegar, you can feel Elgar’s grief in this music and feeling his grief we feel our own grief; this music is a deepening of the soul. As well, Nimrod, a city of antiquity in Iraq, was excavated by Christie's husband, the archaeologist Max Malloran, so this music would have a deeper meaning for Christie, she accompanied her husband on this archaeological dig. Nimrod is also a biblical character and it is possible that Nimrod is another name for Gilgamesh, the central character in The Epic of Gilgamesh. I like to tie things together, to see what is significant and what gives meaning to life; The Epic of Gilgamesh deals specifically with the grief of losing a close friend, as Gilgamesh lost Enkidu, as Elgar lost Jaegar, as Max would lose Agatha upon her death, as Agatha would lose Max.
Finally, in addition to Miss Marple and Hercule Poirot, and Sherlock Holmes, one of my favourite detective characters is Colin Dexter's Morse; all of the episodes of this television series with John Thaw are excellent, and the subsequent shows, after Thaws's death, Lewis and Endeavour, are also excellent. An episode of Morse entitled "Dead on Time" features Schubert's String Quintet in C major; like Elgar's Nimrod this is a deeply moving piece of music, it is an entrance way to the soul, to memory and the past, to the ancestors, and to our very existence and history. In the long run it is the soul that concerns us, for we are visitors to this life and our work is the soul’s work, which is to become conscious human beings.
Friday, December 29, 2023
Thursday, December 28, 2023
"Intruder" by Glen Sorestad
2013 |
The red fox lolled on the manicured green
of our back condo lawn like any domestic dog –
warm autumn afternoon, newly mown grass
tickling its nose, a fox-nap imminent,
but only if those loud villains looming above
in the shaggy blue spruce would spare their vitriol.
An unruly mob of crows, freshly summoned,
hurled dark invective at the unwanted visitor.
The black gang deemed this their territory,
now under egregious trespass from the sleek sneak,
the protesters alerting all within hearing of their
unmistakable umbrage with the bushy-tailed rogue.
As the clamor reached its acme, the fox rose,
languidly stretched its length, and strolled off
and away in apparent unconcern, from the dark
rancor, now lapsed into sudden, satisfied silence.