Sick Child (Flying)

in the distance
our knowledge starts to fade
is this the tops of some turbulent nimbus
or the flat eroded crater of a diseased volcano
hurling upwards

over the sea
peaks of waves dip and echo
the crests and troughs of the wrinkled land
(it would be a hard healing
hitting one of those)

sleeping in derilium
creases across the sheet
lying over the bedrock of a sick child
body lava hot knees quaking
heave geography


© Martin Porter 2011

This poem has a compound title, and no other explanation. I often insert a commentary into a poem in the form of an epigraph or postscript, but there is no suitable candidate for this. The poem is a very recent piece, and I am not entirely sure it is in final form at this stage, but it has gone through my editing process and I'm not unhappy with the current form.

Language used in poetry does not always follow the established rules of written (prose) language. It may be moulded into unusual forms rather like a sheet of metal in a press, and, like a sheet of metal forced into an unnatural shape, exhibits stress patterns and weaknesses as well as structure and strengths. This poem uses a reduced form, rather like that discussed in an earlier entry "in the cinema stalls watching..." Punctuation may allow the reader to construct a different interpretation, although this is still constrained by structure - the stanza, line structure and parentheses. So although the language has reduced coherence, it has not crossed the boundary of meaning to become nonsensical.

In some ways this poem may be seen as difficult in the sense that the meaning is not immediately obvious. As discussed in the entry "Disregarding 12 0 2", there may not be a need for a poem to be immediately obvious. It may be argued that poems which reveal their all in one single glance are just too obvious, but such judgements become subjective. A case, perhaps, of one man's meat... Unlike "Disregarding 12 0 2", this poem is difficult not because of the reduced content of the subject matter (which concentrates on what is actually happening, not where or why) but because of the language and its use. The obscurity is not going to be lifted by a simple internet search, because knowledge is not the issue here, this is a poem that is more about the seen and the interpreted.

This poem starts as a relatively simple description of a scene viewed from above as indicated in the last part of the title, although the first two lines are designed to challenge a simple interpretation. The use of brackets at the end of second stanza is intended to add an external commentary, but external to the narrator rather than external to the poem. Here the poem starts to move towards the edge of simplicity, and the language starts to obtain meaning not from the words used but from the structures in which they are placed. The structure becomes more chaotic in the third stanza, a structure that is prefigured by the word "diseased", which matches the word "derilium" used at the start of this final stanza. Note that the structure becomes chaotic, not disorganised. There is something structural operating there, rather like a defined feedback process that produces unpredictable results rather than just randomness or ill-discipline.

The first stanza contextualises the poem in both space and time. The time is the geological present, the place is what I call "home". The language has to work hard to push this past this boundary to an understanding of the origins of this location. The understanding is not a scientific understanding, however, but a poetic understanding. It attempts to take the reader past the point of tectonic activity and theory and pushes towards the concept that this young land has parallels to a sick child, hence the title. Perhaps this is what gives the poem the opacity that can be seen as a problem. But this is a good place to ask whether a poem should be just description, or just knowledge based, or perhaps something more visceral.

By using structure and move understanding past knowledge by using analogy, this poem tries to push language past the simple use of words. It takes the observation of a landscape on the clashing edge of tectonic plates, pushes language beyond its normal boundaries and takes the reader past  the visible into something that lies beyond the seen. In some ways the language is also searching for this substratum, a language beneath language.

The poem is not just about the known, it is about the experience the feelings and the interpretative process that rationalises and stores the experience into the fabric of the observers conception of nature. If nature poetry is to advance, perhaps it should position both language and place on the edge. The skill is to ensure it soes not fall over the edge, either into the dull or into the incoherent.

Le Bar aux Folies-Bergère

The poem "Le Bar aux Folies-Bergère, Édouard Manet, 1882" has been published on a free broadsheet available through the Take Flight Writing in Whangarei blog.

The broadsheet can also be downloaded from here.

The poem is based on the painting by Manet, which has fascinated and slightly disconcerted me for many years. It is a painting that just is not right - the perspectives don't quite work, the reflections are physically impossible, the background seems to display an opulence that seems ill at ease, the man in the top hat is just scary and is clearly meant to be us, the viewer. I had been aware that Manet was not an apolitical artist, but the painting seemed to be shouting a message that I just could not get to grips with, perhaps because of stupidity, or ignorance (ie: ignore-ance) or just a plain unwillingness to face the message squarely.

What makes the poem interesting for me is its more ambiguous birth. The epigraph hints at this origin by quoting from Copolla's Lost in Translation, a film I found baffling at first viewing, but which made more and more sense as I thought about it. Rather like the painting, the film offers up a different disjunctive perspective on the world without offering any solutions to the breakdown in comprehension, and it was this that I tried to incorporate into the poem.
When is a poem simply a version of another poem. This poem has so much in common with "in the cinema stalls watching". Clearly it is using different words, a different context and so it is a different poem. Or is it really a different poem and not the same poem, just taken from a different point of view. At the moment this is a puzzle that I have not resolved, but its been entertaining me for some time.

Eventually I came to realise the poem came to a different conclusion to Bob simply because it does not offer any solutions. Instead, the look on Suzon's face says something very different - a look of grief into an uncertain, likely a bleak, future that makes no sense but neverless happens. Its all rather different to Olympia, Le Déjeuner sur l'Herbe and even The Execution of Maximilian, all works that reflect a rather more realistic view on the world, perhaps not entirely credible or likely to be experienced as such, but neverless possible. And, of course, this is Manet's last painting.

in the cinema stalls watching

I saw that distant look in your eyes
the type that says you are concentrating but not concentrating
on the screen
and I leaned over to say

but You said
it is always the same in these movies
two people meet
they strike an unlikely partnership
it develops an unexpected problem arises
the threat is somehow overcome developing into a final happiness

they are just stories

I said
but you must suspend your disbelief
and You replied there are no such things as belief nor disbelief
only indifference

the truth of the matter is the stories are all wrong
it is not the plot that carries us
it is the distant gaze
and the absence
the voice subtly breaking
that slight tightening of the grip
these are the real cast the real plotline
without these there is no syntax no punctuation
and we all live in a screenplay of progression and loss

and we all wish we were in the cinema stalls

watching

© Martin Porter 2011


This poem is also posted on the Take Flight Writing in Whangarei blog.

This poem is a hybrid poem. In part it is a dialogue, in part a list poem.

The origin of this poem is complex. It is, in some ways, a Marilyn poem. But it has many other sources, and somehow Marilyn Monroe has dropped out of the poem altogether. Certainly it has its origins in some of my earlier poems: After the Trailers, Callan in Black and White, The Fairy Fellers Master Stroke anr all unpublished and unread but influential. The mood of melancholy that I hope the poem presents can be felt in Cool (Sharks) and Pigeon Fanciers, published in this blog, and many other poems that I have written. The epistemological reflections can be traced back to poems such as Skin, published on the 52/250 A Year of Flash blog. The mysticism and other-worldliness can be found in many poems, including Pasifika Queen Mab on this blog.

But there are other sources on which to reflect. The poem was written shortly after I watched "Lost in Translation", the Sofia Coppola film that demonstrates disjuncture and bewilderment in a way in which I find all too familiar in the off-screen world. The whole suspension of reality of the cinema (or theatre or opera) based around idealised plots and simplified realities seems to be put under the spotlight in this film, quite the remarkable irony!

The Gormenghast trilogy by Mervyn Peake is another more conscious source of ideas for this poem. Particularly referenced is the chapter based around Alfred Prunesquallor's reaction to the death of Fuschia Groan in Gormenghast, a passage I found thirty years ago and still raises the hairs on the back of my neck.

Discussions with the poetry group in Whanagarei have also contributed to the construction of this poem. Particularly influential was a discussion about the role of punctuation in poetry, particularly the capitalisation of words at the start of lines, but also the use of punctuation. Here, I have used capitalisation in an attempt to impose my own structure abd omitted punctuation partially to allow the reader freedom of interpretation, but also to allow an ambiguity in the structure as well as in the language used.