Aug 292013
 

The above title was in a letter from Ted Hughes to Keith Sagar and is quoted in the current LRB (29 August 2013 Half-Fox by Seamus Perry. It would seem possible that we are suffering from the same disease. Or perhaps discomfort is a better word. Or condition?? Perry, in his review, expends some energy on reflections on Ted Hughes’ Crow. I loved that book! Back in 1970 or thereabouts I devoured it or it might be more accurate to say that it devoured me – took possession of me – formed my views of what writing should and could be. Somehow or other over the course of the last forty years I lost my copy of Crow and it seems I must buy a new copy. I want to find out how it touches me now. There’s a hope that it would reinvigorate my writing. Help me into that wildness that is at the heart of Hughes’ best writing.

And there is the fact that most people find the writing on our blog repellent or confusing or nonsensical or difficult or too wild as somebody said to me recently. As though we deliberately set out to alienate possible readers. Do we? These two old crows scratching about in the dust. Hopping, cackling, laughing and hurling insults.

Two punk crows too old to be dangerous.

It seems Hughes at times suffered self-doubts, as Perry quotes from another letter: ‘what I might have made of Crow’. Is that a despairing howl? But I loved Perry’s final sentence and quotation from Hughes: ‘In the end,’ Hughes told one of his interviewers, ‘one’s poems are ragged dirty undated letters from remote battles and weddings and one thing and another’.

Kiosk 12

May 152013
 
Kiosk 28, Assos

I am slowly absorbing a poem which arrived in my inbox last Friday:

‘Evolution’ by Jorie Graham.

 

One’s nakedness is very slow.

One calls to it, one wastes one’s sympathy.

Comparison, too, is very slow.

Where is the past?

I sense that we should keep this coming.

Something like joy rivulets along the sand.

I insists that we “go in.” We go in.

One cannot keep all of it. What is enough

of it. And keep?-I am being swept away-

what is keep? A waking good.

Visibility blocking the view.

Although we associate the manifest with kindness.

The way it goes where it goes, slight downslope.

Like the word “suddenly,” the incline it causes.

Also the eye’s wild joy sucked down the slope the minutes wave by wave

pack down and slick.

The journey-some journey-visits one.

The journey-some journey-visits me.

Then this downslope once again.

And how it makes what happens

always more heavily

laden, this self only able to sink (albeit also lifting

as in a

sudden draught) into the future. Our future. Where everyone

is patient. Where all the sentences come to complete themselves.

Where what wants to be human still won’t show

its face.

(from The Taken Down God by Jorie Graham, published this month by Carcanet.)

Sep 292008
 

Saying Goodbye

Misty autumnal 8 a.m.
A line of twenty-two geese
On their early morning commute
Lazy flapping
Following the tracks
Keeping to the margins of earth and sea
Ignoring the cormorant hanging out to dry.

Part of me is still looking around
That last look
Nervous in anticipation of what I’ve forgotten
Or never thought that I needed
Realisations held off until some indeterminate moment in a future
Long imagined
But it no longer matters
The boundary of waiting and moving has been crossed

For a few moments at five thirty seven yesterday evening
A few moments before cooking fish
With a tomato sauce and spaghetti
Wrecked from the packing and snipping
The threads of my ‘old’ life –
NO – I can’t do this
This might be too much for me
And then from not being hungry, I’m ravenous . . .

for this new life
Rabbits and pheasants play at being rabbits and pheasants
And the mist rich sodden fields play at referring to Arthurian deep structure

And what about all those friends I didn’t manage to see
Or phone
Or e-mail
To say au revoir – I’m off to a new life

After supper it was off to the Barn
To watch Philippe Petit as the Man on the Wire
– An angel
And look at what it takes to be an angel
Cheek chutzpah total dedication
And then to have whatever it takes to step on to the wire
A quarter of a mile above the earth

– So that’s where angels live!

But not me I hasten to add
Apart from a couple of hours or so
Cooped in easyJet style
I intend keeping my feet on the ground
Rather awed (and bowed)
By glimpses though the clouds of the mountains ahead.