jpsatmur

[jpsatmur]

Many poets write their best work when they live close to the land, to its seasonal rhythms and medley of lives. John Clare, Ted Hughes, Mary Oliver. And then there's Emma Alice Johnson, who has lived for 2 years on a farm with a cat, a pig, and chickens for company. Quiet, calm, and the taxing but also meditative routines of farm life have resulted in a gently luminous collection of poems about the feathered people in Emma's life. Personhood is the vital spark that she learns to see in her small charges, and that ties together this quietly brave book. I highly recommend it.

https://bottlecap.press/products/chicken

#poetry

[jpsatmur]

THE LAST SEPTEMBER by Elizabeth Bowen

Ireland in the 1920s. The Anglo-Irish aristocracy live in the Big Houses, in a whirl of dinner parties, tennis, social visits, ignoring the Troubles, neither fully Irish nor English. Old family retainers and servers have relatives in the Sinn Fein. British soldiers come to the Big Houses' dances and tennis matches, providing a frisson of excitement for the young women. In Danielstown, the Big House this novel is set in and around, the old observe everything at a remove, while the young are also distanced, alienated from feeling quite part of either side. Their time is running out, and this last September in Danielstown is a kind of dance before apocalypse.

People in this novel talk to each other - but really, at and around each other. They only fully, disastrously listen and understand when it is clear the other has nothing to say. The couples are locked in a kind of mutual incomprehension. The world is a succession of dim lights in a room that is falling in on itself.

Magnificent.

#books #literature #women writers

[jpsatmur]

[jpsatmur]

posting for any moots who are monarchists/stans of the stupid hat lady, this thread of reasons not to mourn her passing is too long to screen cap every tweet so follow the link: https://twitter.com/cecilapetals/status/1567959305927933952?s=21 https://www.instagram.com/p/CiRX4gdp3ipQfMd7JV1MSl-o2z3RcLfdF0LEng0/?igshid=NGJjMDIxMWI=

[jpsatmur]

An update no one will care about:

I've uploaded a ~40 page poetry pamphlet called THE TURNING OF THE WORLD to Google Drive. It's a pdf.

Download, read, share at will.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/1MAKywPP9SIwVv3jn0jeKivtW7GMZ2cw5/view

[jpsatmur]

The silent part 

It's true that I find you more beautiful now

Than when we first met

Fifteen years ago, neither of us

In our first youth, but still in our 20s

It's true that I find you more beautiful now

But how do I say this and let the translation 

Of my words from thought to speech 

Not lose their meaning, their truth? 

All that we may say or sing of love

Has been said and sung, severally, in

Earnestness, in cynicism, in deception, in

Exaggeration, by rote, as a matter of form,

A trick, a trap, a stratagem 

So how am I to say

It's true that I find you more beautiful now

And shadow this perfect hour

With the weighing of feeling, the

Assaying of truth? 

So we'll sit here quietly 

Or you'll tell me a terrible pun a friend made 

Or I'll read you something from a book

And our conversation won't go there 

But it will say the same thing 

To anyone who listens:

It's true that I find you more beautiful than ever. 

[jpsatmur]

Made like this

Today I clicked on a video

& saw rope being made

By hand, with wooden machines

Operated by hand

& for all those long ages

When rope hung murderers harlots cutpurses

Sailed conquering ships to our lands

Winched gallons of water to slake our thirst

All those ages when rope

Held the world together, spun it around

It was all being made like this

By hand, with force & focus

Fibres filched from tree or husk

Beaten & stretched & twined & wound &

Rope held the world together &

Spun it around

& it took me back to why this world

& it took me back to the making

How the making is above but also part of

The uses, the causes, the stretched neck the

Carted crate, staunch rigging, knotted fate

We take everything apart

& worry at & work at it

& put it together & there is something else

& it takes me back to why this world

Takes me back to why these words

All made like this.

[jpsatmur]

Jettison

Again I (do not) regret to be

The sort who cannot

Name and categorise

Much of anything

Flowers buildings bodies

I am only here for vague surfaces

I am only here for unseen depths

I am not here

As captive warriors strain against diamond chains in the hold aromatic with sandalwood and fear the sick admiral sweats acrid moisture his sheets of purest cotton soak up thirstily avidly until they are saturated and he wakes momentarily to utter a curse which startles the fan-man who for a second breaks rhythm and is lost awakened again from the ancestral dream to the morning cry from the alarm clock on his phone to the tense silence of his wife already laying breakfast on the table the resigned silence of his son shoveling cereal from a cheap blue plastic bowl

Bury me in only adverbs

Leave me with no proper nouns

Not even my own

And certainly no more verbs

Adjectives? I used them up

I was not the kind of crank

Who knew things and wrote them

In pared-down lines

I am not the sort who meant much

I am not here

The last empress of the coral reef hurls a spear at the sun but the sky congeals around it holding it turning it in its flight aiming it at a waste of pebbles plastic and weeds a barren plot is broken apart and seawater flows free through the stalls and trash heaps of the meanest street in the city lazy taxi drivers spit in the foaming swirl just before it gathers all the imperious force of its inception and lifts their cars tosses them here and there leaves them hanging from lampposts smashed on rooftops dripping engine oil and petrol the wounded city's guts on display everyone drowns and the city sleeps on

I was not the sort of bird (Moira)

The oracles heard

Not the sort of phenomenon

Categorised an omen

I am not a bag of tricks

Nor can I pay to get this fixed

I will nothing by seeing

Nothing into being

I am not here

Caravans stop short as the arrows and bullets of their traditional enemies fail to wing toward them at the customary point on their journey this is worse than losing a cargo worse than the rat tooth chew-chewing of taxes the guards fling away their rifles rip open their uniforms and shred their bared chests with razor sharp fingernails while the merchant princes ululate a dividing line between day and night cleaves the scene in half there is a hue of pomegranate a whiff of coconut jettison jettison jettison all is lost.

[jpsatmur]

The Good Old Boys

Sundown to sunup the world changes its face

Office doors open out onto the human race

Crowds no longer obstacles, with time a truce

Swarm the streets you salarymen let loose

Sundown chimes the abeyance of servitude

Now the workday is recast as a prelude

The lift down to the street is an ascent

Electric light is the lord of the moment

Grapple with ideas in the cafe of chatter

With friends and mind and coffee and matter

The night cartwheels into her second act

Prop a bar, nod to the barkeep, familiar contract

No one knows about moon phases as pint chases

Pint down the hatch and the syllable race is

On a spiral from blabber to stammer, drumbeat to drawl

At long last the keeper of mirth sounds last call

It's time to scram and scramble and find

Some place to continue drinking yourselves blind

Sunrise finds ruined men seeking survival

The commute snakes, spits them dead on arrival

Office doors open in for sleepwalkers with ID cards

Holding in their heads night's last shimmering shards

And so and on and so and on and on and on

And they'll breed sons to replace them when they're gone.

[jpsatmur]

Now -

the arrow twists

      the weather vane turns

in the fists of an unseen force

    an invisible fire burns

smoke rises over all

     covers the century trace

ashes begin to fall

     cover your tearful face

cover your name

      burn down all the signs

forget the skies

      shame and confusion

are now your maps. 

[jpsatmur]

FIERCE ATTACHMENTS by Vivian Gornick

I've been reading a lot of memoirs this year. Tove Ditlevsen took me from a working class childhood in Sweden to the awakening of a literary career, and through addiction and madness. Annie Ernaux made me a companion to a whole generation, and a witness to her parents, to herself in love, and to her last years with her mother. Philip Roth startled me with a frank, sensitive memoir of his own father's old age. Now, this dual, or even tapestry like memoir of womanhood - Gornick and her mother, the women closest to them, the men in their lives.

I'm in my 40s and my mother in her late 60s. She is my only living parent. In Gopnick's close, prickly, not always functional, not always adversarial relationship with her mother, I see so much of my mother and me. But, not being a woman, of Gopnick's generation or any other, I also see a perspective different from mine, a fascinating one to learn about and from.

And this is such a rich book, so full of life and feeling. And by the end, Gopnick has painted herself and her mother, people lost and found in their different ways, so vividly, I found myself laughing with the joy of recognition even in the tensest moments between child and parent.

I also love that Gopnick talks about being an Odd woman. I am married, but have chosen to be childless, and to pursue a life of literary endeavour, musical dabbling, and domestic animal rescue - I am an Odd man, in my own way, and I see from Gopnick's life that being yourself is never easy, but if it is true, it is worth it.

A rambling excuse for a review. I hope I have conveyed something of how good this book is, how generous and enriching.

[jpsatmur]

Sonnet, 16th September, 2021

I read in so many books

    and remember of myself, 

the child in the alcove

    with a book from the shelf. 

Free of the immediate

       coiled, private, curled

in a dream of reality, 

        a surmise about the world. 

Have you been there too? 

      Did we glimpse each other

Before a voice pierced the bubble,        

        someone's father, someone's mother? 

Calling us back from the possible

Calling us back to the evitable. 

[jpsatmur]

All those old things

The rooms of the recent dead

The next day   the next   month the

Next year      while traces remain

Sleeping in the beds    of the dead

Dear,  lost ones     that  I fought with

And ran from    some point or another

As I have every single person I

Really loved.    Also many I didn't

But especially the ones   I did

Every one    of them. 

Dear lost ones    I may not always

Have cherished them.    I do not want

To paint     the us of me and   them

In some    valedictory glow

Truth     is most    worthy of ones I

Truly          loved. 

But I was talking   about rooms and

Beds.   The old-fashioned fans

And lamps   above,  the heavy 

Wardrobe beside.       The windows, 

Especially in the last days    the

Last views      of a street or a tree 

Or a space between buildings or    

A courtyard   or drain pipes

The last ceilings    stared up at

In last reveries    I think of 

A couple's last bed   then  the one left

The half of the couple     his or her

Last bed      how it is different

To have slept alone    for decades

And    again after decades.   Loneliness must grow back suddenly

A caul     masking the world from you

Except perhaps   this room  

The few pictures   and odds and ends

Carried room to room    age to age

Very few   or very many those

Old things.     Where do they   go

How much they must carry    of you

How much they carried     you. 

My mother knows the   histories

Of many pieces of furniture

That are   neither here nor there 

Now. Things of the recent dead   the

Middle dead    the long dead   things

Too old to be useful    too new to

Be antique  too commonplace

To be   heirlooms. I have a blue

checked shirt that was   one

Grandfather's   and a pale  yellow

Dress shirt that was the other

Grandfather's last   gift to me

Nothing material   of my father

Well - some books, these limbs

The way   my feet twitch

One grandmother's   stubbornness

And several cartons of her papers

And, in secret, the easy tears 

Of the other grandmother.    Some

Photographs of me   one grandfather

Always kept.       Rooms    

Ceilings   worst of all    hospital

Rooms     death          time

Where will I    can I choose

Time will choose      I know a house

Where I'd like to die    a room

But   time will choose     and then

Someone must deal with   all

Those old things.    They must be 

around here, somewhere… 

[jpsatmur]

Blank verse

I've read high renaissance verse that expected you - contemporary, countryman, able to afford an education, taught the same things - to know all the books hidden in the verse. 

In the twentieth century, democracy came to the publishing houses. Some still filled their books with antiquity, with Greek tags and French epigraphs. Others fell back on the common ground of common people. That's all old hat now. The educated and ambitious need mirrors, the unpretentious want magic doors. 

Fools like me don't know what we know, don't want what we want, write silent books unpopulated with commonplaces and with no common ground, barely in any language at all. We don't want to amuse or tickle or massage or prod. Humble enough not to want to command, wise ones like me fall silent. Don't you know my words right now are an absence, a silence? 

Some live from page to page, whether filling or absorbing. I have decided to empty the pages. My art is now subtractive. I know that meaning is a standstill. I only remove from the blankness, only erase parts of the emptiness of the page. Do not think I am a creator, communicator, connector. We have nothing in common except these empty pages, and these empty pages are nothing. 

10/9

[jpsatmur]

I was 24, in my first job. We had a small meeting room with a TV in it. Towards the end of my workday, my bosses and some of my colleagues had gathered around the TV. The first tower had been hit. I wasn't really processing, I was in a hurry to wrap up for the day. By the time I reached the pub, everyone was talking about it. Again, I wasn't very focused. The first coherent thought I had was: wow this is payback. And then: oh man, the US is just going to launch so many more foreign wars now.

[jpsatmur]

Bhikshu

People come here for WISDOM

Can you imagine?

(I think, but don't know,

Leonard Cohen, wiser,

Came here to be anonymous

And write, peering out at the

Arabian Sea. Just some

Parsi uncle or visiting CEO

At first glance - he noted

The women here did not desire him)

Anyway, people come here, some

Still do, for wisdom, and you can

Tell them apart by their STUPIDITY.

Don't come to this country to learn -

The teachers we celebrate here

Are torturers and cheats. Mutilators,

Plagiarists. Our only good teachers

Had to walk through the streets

Being SPAT AT.

Oh of course the worthless teachers

Will teach you. Even a mleccha can

Find a place the untouchable

never will. Pale as your skin is, your

Eurodollas are the brightest colour

Drona's eyes have seen. See him

Thumbing the wad of notes

You casually hand over to him.

He teaches you MOKSHA and you

Bring him the goddess LAKSHMI

The sweet smell of her lilting lotus

Drowning out the street stink of

Scams and scandals.

If you must come here to learn

LOSE your way everyday

Get drunk on all the stink

Acclimatise to the shouts

The garish blare of song,

Secular and sacred

Get used to grease on everything

Kababs, palms, the long tresses

Of hijras clapping at the traffic lights

(Give them your money - they

Deserve it more) Get used to knowing

We are just like you

But YOU will never be like us.

You have spent too long

At the centre, you have stood

Too long at the top of the ladder

And you don't know how we

Are just like you. And you can't

Know who you are or we are.

You have become a BOOT

And you can neither lift yourself

Off our backs nor become,

To us, a person.

9/9/21

[jpsatmur]

THE LATE BOURGEOIS WORLD by Nadine Gordimer

What a sleek, slim torpedo of a book. It is South Africa in the 60s. All black political parties are banned. A still-young white woman learns that her ex-husband, who was involved with black resistance movements, and later turned state's evidence when captured after a failed bombing attempt - has committed suicide. Her grandmother, who lives in a nursing home, is turning 87. She drives to her son's boarding school to tell him of his father's death. She visits her grandmother. She thinks back over her life with her ex-husband, their years of political engagement. We get a survey of her life at present, her stable job in a medical lab, her comfortable, not too passionate affair with a lawyer. American astronauts are walking in space. Finally, a black man in the political underground comes to meet her. Will she help him and his comrades receive funds from the UK?

Will she jepordise her placid, slightly empty life, to do so, and if so, why?

In these 95 pages, Gordimer gives us two lives - Elisabeth's and her ex, Max's - and an idea of many of those around theirs, caught in a time of upheaval. As powerful as the lure of space in those decades, is the pull felt in this troubled country - of some kind of change - but what, and what cost can each individual afford, or choose to afford?

In times as riven as any, this stringent, perceptive novel continues to have heft and implication. Not only political - the personal, and the changeless turmoil of human nature - are as central here.

My first Gordimer, and I feel like running down to the bookstore for more.