Month: April 2022

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Communication breakdown

Up, and walked abroad in the garden, and find that Mrs. Tooker has not any of her daughters here as I expected and so walked to the yard, leaving Middleton at the pay, and there I only walked up and down the yard, and then to the Hill-House, and there did give order for the coach to be made ready; and got Mr. Gibson, whom I carried with me, to go with me and Mr. Coney, the surgeon, towards Maydston which I had a mighty mind to see, and took occasion, in my way, at St. Margett’s, to pretend to call to see Captain Allen to see whether Mrs. Jowles, his daughter, was there; and there his wife come to the door, he being at London, and through a window, I spied Jowles, but took no notice of her but made excuse till night, and then promised to come and see Mrs. Allen again, and so away, it being a mighty cold and windy, but clear day; and had the pleasure of seeing the Medway running, winding up and down mightily, and a very fine country; and I went a little out of the way to have visited Sir John Bankes, but he at London; but here I had a sight of his seat and house, the outside, which is an old abbey just like Hinchingbroke, and as good at least, and mighty finely placed by the river; and he keeps the grounds about it, and walls and the house, very handsome: I was mightily pleased with the sight of it. Thence to Maydstone, which I had a mighty mind to see, having never been there; and walked all up and down the town, and up to the top of the steeple, and had a noble view, and then down again: and in the town did see an old man beating of flax, and did step into the barn and give him money, and saw that piece of husbandry which I never saw, and it is very pretty: in the street also I did buy and send to our inne, the Bell, a dish of fresh fish. And so, having walked all round the town, and found it very pretty, as most towns I ever saw, though not very big, and people of good fashion in it, we to our inne to dinner, and had a good dinner; and after dinner a barber come to me, and there trimmed me, that I might be clean against night, to go to Mrs. Allen. And so, staying till about four o’clock, we set out, I alone in the coach going and coming; and in our way back, I ’light out of the way to see a Saxon monument, as they say, of a King, which is three stones standing upright, and a great round one lying on them, of great bigness, although not so big as those on Salisbury Plain; but certainly it is a thing of great antiquity, and I mightily glad to see it; it is near to Aylesford, where Sir John Bankes lives. So homeward, and stopped again at Captain Allen’s, and there ’light, and sent the coach and Gibson home, and I and Coney staid; and there comes to us Mrs. Jowles, who is a very fine, proper lady, as most I know, and well dressed. Here was also a gentleman, one Major Manly, and his wife, neighbours; and here we staid, and drank, and talked, and set Coney and him to play while Mrs. Jowles and I to talk, and there had all our old stories up, and there I had the liberty to salute her often, and pull off her glove, where her hand mighty moist, and she mighty free in kindness to me, and je do not at all doubt that I might have had that that I would have desired de elle had I had time to have carried her to Cobham, as she, upon my proposing it, was very willing to go, for elle is a whore, that is certain, but a very brave and comely one. Here was a pretty cozen of hers come in to supper also, of a great fortune, daughter-in-law to this Manly, mighty pretty, but had now such a cold, she could not speak. Here mightily pleased with Mrs. Jowles, and did get her to the street door, and there to her su breasts, and baiser her without any force, and credo that I might have had all else, but it was not time nor place. Here staid till almost twelve at night, and then with a lanthorn from thence walked over the fields, as dark as pitch, and mighty cold, and snow, to Chatham, and Mr. Coney with great kindness to me: and there all in bed before I come home, and so I presently to bed.

on a walk up a hill
the urge to call in an owl

and promise it
a cold wind

clear like the river
a dish of fresh fish

and people trimmed
into stones standing upright

the antiquity of a doubt
that could not speak

with owls or breasts
the fields dark as pitch

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Wednesday 24 March 1669.

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Bricolage

~ "Angelus Novus," Paul Klee


Now and again
you remember
the fragment

Wreckage
from around 
the angel's feet

You could open 
many things 
with a fragment

How easily 
it slips into 
your hand

Beautiful 
detritus
Vascular 

scoria 
of tiny hidden 
cavities

In each one
a constellate
a branching
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April Diary 3: stag beetle, wolf spider and fly

river in November light between bare woods and mountain
This entry is part 3 of 31 in the series April Diary

 

Dear April when I open my laptop this morning Poetry Daily which i have set as my home page has a poem by George Szirtes called Stag Beetle

beginning with a rhyming quatrain and switching into prose like an inside-out haibun but it works because whatever Szirtes writes tends to work because the man’s a genius and I say this based on years of reading his blog and social media posts — probably the most prominent poet I know to regularly share rough drafts online as Luisa and I do

I love love love poems that evoke the lives of other beings a la Francis Ponge who’s kind of the gold standard for that but there are many more and “Stag Beetle” is a great new addition to that corpus—

When propped up at 45 degrees it suggested a renaissance nightmare, the perfect rejection of humanism, but now, in my palm it simply sat like a philosophical problem.

I’ve met George socially a couple of times but it’s not surprising in a country as small as the UK that we have friends in common and let’s be honest sometimes the poetry scene in the US and Canada feels pretty small and familial as well

albeit a mafiosa family riven with rivalries some of them pretty bitter but the family will take care of you if you take care of it (and I don’t)

so I open my inbox and am happy to see that my friend Patricia aka PF Anderson is once again doing NaPoWriMo, kicking it off with a narrative poem about domestic violence and refugees called Imagine

I subscribe to Patricia’s blog Rosefire Rising for just that reason seeing her poems appear in my inbox every day in April I don’t do this for many poets but hers is a valuable voice of witness and the sort of poet all too often overlooked in our culture that tries to pigeonhole people: someone highly educated in the craft but employed in an unrelated field, who has to be extremely disciplined about setting aside time to write and rarely has any time left over to send work out

but at least there’s blogging

the next poem in my inbox is from another old blogger Risa Denenberg — Cul-de-sac at Autumn Sky Poetry DAILY also a narrative poem and beautifully done

one of the unique things about this periodical is the editor’s note at the end of each poem, just a sentence or two by Christine Klocek-Lim saying what she loves about it

Editor’s note: This poem lures the reader inside the narrative with calm imagery and the speaker’s quiet lawn rebellion until halfway through, when everything crystallizes into a sharp, piercing moment of clarity.

this is a feature I haven’t seen anywhere else but it gives the magazine such a down-home feel

and I admire how she embraces the informality of social media in her editorial style and how she recognizes the utility of blog software for releasing content DAILY

and her capitalization of DAILY suggests maybe a bit of frustration with other poetry editors who persist in releasing periodic content dumps because they can’t break themselves of a print-based scarcity mentality despite the fact that blog software has been with us for 20 years and every other sort of magazine understands how to release content in the digital age </rant>

two emails up it’s the latest daily offering from Rattle and this time I don’t know the poet one Jackie Bartley an evocation of a mother, with the sort of deep empathy one looks to poetry for

Rattle‘s thing is to include a short statement from the author instead of a bio at the end and I am all for this — it reflects an editorial focus on what would be of most interest to the reader rather than what serves the writer

so today Jackie Bartley writes

The hum of my mother’s Singer as the bobbin filled was as soothing as a Tantric chant, a single note resonating with and giving rise to layers of sound. I still relish that sensation: sound and sense in synchrony; word and idea unwound and rewound to form a poem, a compact and tightly layered version of story or state of mind.

my final poem of the morning before i head out for a hike is Luisa’s latest at Via Negativa which went up overnight: Binuro which I love because pickled foods fermenting in underground darkness is extremely my thing

the poem works as a lyrical definition of the title I think based on three minutes of web searching binuro

yesterday found me reading under an umbrella to protect the book from graupel

then i noticed what the poem was saying

i’m being cagey about the author because i ended up finding the poems not to my taste

the term high-brow nonsense poetry came to mind

i will give it another try though at some point

today i’m sitting in the woods on another mountain, on a haiku-collecting mission but this is my lunch break

it’s warmed up to where the flies can buzz and that’s important for two reasons:

  1. there’s a lean and hungry-looking wolf spider prowling the leaves around my feet
  2. i’m re-reading Charles Simic

and flies are to Simic as angels are to Blake

Simic at least in his early books is so full of genuine wisdom, one feels, even if the precise lessons may be hard to articulate

they’re quite like Sufi teaching stories in that regard

so they bear re-reading every few years which is why I’ve been filling in the missing titles in my collection, including this one, Charon’s Cosmology, his third with Braziller after Dismantling the Silence and Return to a Place Lit By a Glass of Milk (yes i’m reading them in order)

such ugly covers! such beautiful paper, binding and printing! truly a pleasure to open, in part so i no longer have to look at that ugly-ass cover

even though i’ve never owned this book i remember parts of nearly every poem

but which parts? maybe only the most obvious ones i think obsessively re-reading “The Elders”

which does begin “I go to great troubles” so perhaps I should

and then wouldn’t you know it I’m joined by another reader

an open book with a housefly on it snd the beginning of Charles Simic’s poem “The Elders”

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Ghosted

Up, and to my office to do a little business there, and so, my things being all ready, I took coach with Commissioner Middleton, Captain Tinker, and Mr. Huchinson, a hackney coach, and over the bridge, and so out towards Chatham, and; dined at Dartford, where we staid an hour or two, it being a cold day; and so on, and got to Chatham just at night, with very good discourse by the way, but mostly of matters of religion, wherein Huchinson his vein lies. After supper, we fell to talk of spirits and apparitions, whereupon many pretty, particular stories were told, so as to make me almost afeard to lie alone, but for shame I could not help it; and so to bed and, being sleepy, fell soon to rest, and so rested well.

the bridge out
we stayed a cold night

our way a vein
of spirits and apparitions

stories old as fear
am I not asleep

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Tuesday 23 March 1669.

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Binuro

Lost art of coaxing                 

                                                                  a thing 
             of flesh past              

                                                        its span      Flay
mudfish or                       

                                                       mackerel and pack in

            rock salt        Bury                       
                                                                  a week or

            more in a mound of yeasted grain


            to sop up                  the juices of  

forced extension—              
                                                            What we 

                        were taught to do: 

Dress 

                                  our little bit of treasure 

           Store it in the dark 

Pray 

                                       for its increase
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Managing expectations

Up, and by water, with W. Hewer, to White Hall, there to attend the Lords of the Treasury; but, before they sat, I did make a step to see Sir W. Coventry at his house, where, I bless God! he is come again; but in my way I met him, and so he took me into his coach and carried me to White Hall, and there set me down where he ought not — at least, he hath not yet leave to come, nor hath thought fit to ask it, hearing that Henry Saville is not only denied to kiss the King’s hand, but the King, being asked it by the Duke of York, did deny it, and directed that the Duke shall not receive him, to wait upon him in his chamber, till further orders. Sir W. Coventry told me that he was going to visit Sir John Trevor, who hath been kind to him; and he shewed me a long list of all his friends that he must this week make visits to, that come to visit him in the Tower; and seems mighty well satisfied with his being out of business, but I hope he will not long be so; at least, I do believe that all must go to wrack if the King do not come to see the want of such a servant. Thence to the Treasury-Chamber, and there all the morning to my great grief, put to do Sir G. Downing’s work of dividing the Customes for this year, between the Navy, the Ordnance and Tangier: but it did so trouble my eyes, that I had rather have given 20l. than have had it to do; but I did thereby oblige Sir Thomas Clifford and Sir J. Duncombe, and so am glad of the opportunity to recommend myself to the former for the latter I need not, he loving me well already. At it till noon, here being several of my brethren with me but doing nothing, but I all. But this day I did also represent to our Treasurers, which was read here, a state of the charge of the Navy, and what the expence of it this year would likely be; which is done so as it will appear well done and to my honour, for so the Lords did take it: and I oblige the Treasurers by doing it, at their request.
Thence with W. Hewer at noon to Unthanke’s, where my wife stays for me and so to the Cocke, where there was no room, and thence to King Street, to several cook’s shops, where nothing to be had; and at last to the corner shop, going down Ivy Lane, by my Lord of Salisbury’s, and there got a good dinner, my wife, and W. Hewer, and I: and after dinner she, with her coach, home; and he and I to look over my papers for the East India Company, against the afternoon: which done, I with them to White Hall, and there to the Treasury-Chamber, where the East India Company and three Councillors pleaded against me alone, for three or four hours, till seven at night, before the Lords; and the Lords did give me the conquest on behalf of the King, but could not come to any conclusion, the Company being stiff: and so I think we shall go to law with them. This done, and my eyes mighty bad with this day’s work, I to Mr. Wren’s, and then up to the Duke of York, and there with Mr. Wren did propound to him my going to Chatham to-morrow with Commissioner Middleton, and so this week to make the pay there, and examine the business of “The Defyance” being lost, and other businesses, which I did the rather, that I might be out of the way at the wedding, and be at a little liberty myself for a day, or two, to find a little pleasure, and give my eyes a little ease. The Duke of York mightily satisfied with it; and so away home, where my wife troubled at my being so late abroad, poor woman! though never more busy, but I satisfied her; and so begun to put things in order for my journey to-morrow, and so, after supper, to bed.

ask a kiss to wait
till further orders

he who must come in hope
will go to wrack

see all the grief
put to work loving

like a cook’s conquest
of the eyes

Erasure poem derived from The Diary of Samuel Pepys, Monday 22 March 1669.