Marilyn does not Travel in the Back Seat of a Car
Dallas, Nov 22nd, 1963.
What fun it was,
what heart wrenching fun.
To be in the car
with all that excited noise,
cheering, the crowd straining
for a glimpse,
she loved the adulation,
even second hand.
Then all of a sudden, high drama.
How she loved those situations,
the melodrama, the ambition,
it was never real,
it was all acting,
wasn’t it?
She would never cradle his head
in her lap, as the car sped away.
She would have her place,
usurped by the other woman,
she would have her vengeance.
Of course she never fired a shot
(then again, nor did he)
but she was there, she was there
and, as sure as hell, you could feel her
straining to reach out to him,
to pluck him from her arms,
knowing that she had won.
knowing that they were in the same place.
© Martin Porter 2010
Thursday, November 4, 2010
Monday, October 25, 2010
In the Beginning
A common workshop exercise is to offer a painting, photograph or sculpture and invite the participant to create a piece of writing around the image portrayed. This poem is based on a painting in the National Gallery of Victoria.
Occasionally a poem cannot exist in its own right. The last line of this poem seems obscure when the poem is read alone, but, as part of a sequence on the colonisation of Australia, the line begins to make sense. There is an element of ambiguity about the line and that is not unintentional. But, then again, the painting has a certain ambiguity about it as well, and also reflects just part of the sequential history of Australia.
In the Beginning
From the painting “Family Group with Cottage and Horse Drawn Carriage” – T. W. McAlpine
In this Arcadia
We swim in the clear stream waters
As the soil bears fruit
And the sun, dappled, flows into the clearings.
As the axe falls
The silence is lofty, vaulted by branches.
The first echoes ever heard
Reverberate.
This is the first fire,
The first warmth of the living being.
A light wind fans the grasping
Holocaust.
© Martin Porter 2010
Occasionally a poem cannot exist in its own right. The last line of this poem seems obscure when the poem is read alone, but, as part of a sequence on the colonisation of Australia, the line begins to make sense. There is an element of ambiguity about the line and that is not unintentional. But, then again, the painting has a certain ambiguity about it as well, and also reflects just part of the sequential history of Australia.
In the Beginning
From the painting “Family Group with Cottage and Horse Drawn Carriage” – T. W. McAlpine
In this Arcadia
We swim in the clear stream waters
As the soil bears fruit
And the sun, dappled, flows into the clearings.
As the axe falls
The silence is lofty, vaulted by branches.
The first echoes ever heard
Reverberate.
This is the first fire,
The first warmth of the living being.
A light wind fans the grasping
Holocaust.
© Martin Porter 2010
Monday, October 4, 2010
Pigeon Fanciers - some general notes
In many ways this poem is a nostalgic investigation of a culture that has been largely lost. The difficulty with pigeon fanciers was the avoidance of cliche and sentimentality.
Pigeon Fanciers is a piece of creative writing. I know no pigeon fanciers and have only cursory interest in the sport. The interest for me in the poem is the culture of a type of man I either imaging or remember from childhood and my time in the north of England, hard working, frequently tired, often highly skilled and frequently desperate for a rest on a Sunday afternoon with the newspaper and with a sporting culture often extending towards fanaticism. It has its origins in a mind map prepared for a different poem based on a study of garage mechanics, still not written but past the conception stage. As a result, this poem is not an end to itself, and in some ways is a first draft of a different poem.
Although this is not a frequent occurrence, poems are sometimes spawned as a result of planning or writing a different poem. Sometimes a poem becomes too cumbersome or internally inconsistent and needs to be split, but that is not the case here. This is not a fragment from a longer work or a poem developed from another either as an edited, expanded or polished version. It is a totally different poem written from the same material, in this case a mind map. One of the benefits of keeping hold of initial, old or redundant material, which I keep in a file known as the "asylum", is that it is available for reflection and a resource for mining at a later date.
Pigeon Fanciers is a piece of creative writing. I know no pigeon fanciers and have only cursory interest in the sport. The interest for me in the poem is the culture of a type of man I either imaging or remember from childhood and my time in the north of England, hard working, frequently tired, often highly skilled and frequently desperate for a rest on a Sunday afternoon with the newspaper and with a sporting culture often extending towards fanaticism. It has its origins in a mind map prepared for a different poem based on a study of garage mechanics, still not written but past the conception stage. As a result, this poem is not an end to itself, and in some ways is a first draft of a different poem.
Although this is not a frequent occurrence, poems are sometimes spawned as a result of planning or writing a different poem. Sometimes a poem becomes too cumbersome or internally inconsistent and needs to be split, but that is not the case here. This is not a fragment from a longer work or a poem developed from another either as an edited, expanded or polished version. It is a totally different poem written from the same material, in this case a mind map. One of the benefits of keeping hold of initial, old or redundant material, which I keep in a file known as the "asylum", is that it is available for reflection and a resource for mining at a later date.
Friday, September 24, 2010
Pigeon Fanciers
Pigeon Fanciers
They call them pigeon
Fanciers,
Which is worrying,
Not pigeon breeders,
Or pigeon racers,
Or tired old men
In flat caps,
Exhausted as a wrung-out
Rainy weekend,
And these same tired men
Read the back pages
Of the News of the World
For the sport
And flick through the rest,
Lining
For the bottom of the loft.
Of course,
The birds do the work,
Carry the skill.
The yellow, nicotined
Hands, pock-marked by
Steel splinters,
Oiled into the whorls
Of the fingerprint,
Are too arthritic
Or just too
Work worn
To be energetic,
But pass love
Tenderly
Into the breast of a precious racer.
© Martin Porter 2008
They call them pigeon
Fanciers,
Which is worrying,
Not pigeon breeders,
Or pigeon racers,
Or tired old men
In flat caps,
Exhausted as a wrung-out
Rainy weekend,
And these same tired men
Read the back pages
Of the News of the World
For the sport
And flick through the rest,
Lining
For the bottom of the loft.
Of course,
The birds do the work,
Carry the skill.
The yellow, nicotined
Hands, pock-marked by
Steel splinters,
Oiled into the whorls
Of the fingerprint,
Are too arthritic
Or just too
Work worn
To be energetic,
But pass love
Tenderly
Into the breast of a precious racer.
© Martin Porter 2008
Wednesday, September 22, 2010
Pasifika Queen Mab and symmetry
The first stanza of Pasifika Queen Mab is phrased to reflect the last stanza, or perhaps the other way round, as does the "densely sweetened perfume" and "heavy musk". The symmetry this imposes on the poem is an important concept in many of my poems. In Pasifika Queen Mab there are also internal symmetries, such as "her irksome work" in the second stanza and the "rest" in the penultimate stanza or the traveller and the wanderer in the 5th and 7th stanza, which top and tail the incantation section of the poem. Because of the 4 stanza, 3 stanza, 2 stanza structure of the poem, maintaining these internal symmetries proved to be difficult, and led to displacements in the symmetry.
Thursday, September 2, 2010
Pasifika Queen Mab
Pasifika Queen Mab is a dichotomy poem. It deals with two different worlds, the world of the quintessential English transposed into the world of the New Zealand bush. In some ways it is a poem about immigration, but not intentionally. It is more about abandonment and loneliness. Although not written as an exercise, such dichotomy poems where two different, perhaps conflicting, ideas are brought together make good workshop practice and stretch the imagination.
The central character, Queen Mab, is a mythical figure. The epigraph is from Mercutio's speech in Romeo and Juliet Act 1 Scene 4, and is sometimes curtailed from some transcripts. The postscript is from Percy Bysse Shelley's "Queen Mab" which can be found at http://www.bartleby.com/139/shel111.html. A further reference is Richard Dadd's great painting "The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke", held in the Tate Gallery, London and imaged at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Image-Dadd_-_Fairy_Feller%27s.jpg. Mab can be seen as an English fairy, but this does not quite mean a cute flying girl in a fluffy white dress, but more along the rather wild and ambivalent figures often portrayed in European stories such as those told by the Grimm brothers. There are often elements of madness associated with faery, and it is noteworthy that the patricide Dadd painted "The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke" while incarcerated in Bedlam. Mercutio's state of mind was not at its clearest in his "Queen Mab" speech. Elements of chaos are also present in Dunsany's "The King of Elfland's Daughter"
There are references to other works made in the poem. "Attercop" is a dialect word from Yorkshire, but was used by Bilbo Baggins to insult the spiders of Mirkwood in Tolkien's "The Hobbit". References to the phosphorescent sea could come from anyone with an experience of planktonic phosphorescence, but is, in fact, based on a passage from Sheldon Vanauken's "A Severe Mercy". The moths' drift to immolation is a lingering memory from Robert Way's "The Garden of the Beloved". There are also major elements of the unhappy tension between Lirazal and her love for her homeland, Alveric and her son Orion and the resulting disorder in Lord Dunsany's " The King of Elfland's Daughter" included in the poem. Tennyson's Lady of Shalott is present in her skiff. The mystical Sybil of Cumae is also added to the mix, who, according to legend, made an unfortunately thoughtless wish for longevity and lived to wither away, until only her voice was left.
These varied references make Pasifika Queen Mab a difficult poem, which often seems to cause confusion. The epigraph and postscript offer clues, but the allusions to niche works require particular knowledge. There are issues in how much this should intrude into understanding the poem, and how much the poem should be able to be a self-contained whole. Hopefully the background knowledge enhances the poem and is not an essential to the narrative. Perhaps because of its central character, Pasifika Queen Mab may be seen as a "childrens' poem". It is not intended as such, nor is it suitable as such. Our concept of "fairy" has changed substantially from the more indimidating concept of the supernatural and unseen world of the past.
The structure of Pasifika Queen Mab is designed to enhance the "magic" element of the poem. The verse structure is based around the "lucky number", 3. It consists of three lines in each stanza, with nine ie: 3x3 stanzas. There is an element of the inverted pyramid, with the nine stanzas being split into a four stanza scene-setting, a three stanza "incantation" and a two stanza conclusion. The stanzas of the introduction scene and conclusion have an aba rhyming structure, but the incantation has an aaa rhyming structure, to emphasise the magical concept of an incantation, as if some charm was being recited to bring Queen Mab into the conscious world. The incantation is distinguished by each line starting with Queen Mab herself, in the word "She".
Likewise, the language is chosen to reflect a world of half-light, dankness, decay, heavy scents and inhuman life forms. A sense of weariness, loss, loneliness, mistrust, regret and detachment from ancestry is injected into the poem, sometimes directly, sometimes by implication due to the choice of words. A sense of anger or fear is avoided by careful use of language to emphasise the sense of resignation, perhaps depression
Pasifika Queen Mab
“This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs,
That presses them and learns them first to bear,
Making them women of good carriage:”
Romeo and Juliet
Doping nocturnal moths, dry and empty in their brown winged shells,
The densely sweetened perfume of manuka hugs the ground
Insinuating through the dreams of wood-wasp in their paper cells.
As day gives up her irksome work the dark womb meets her need
And sultry through the musky heat the moon rests in her cup
And counts each starry glimmer as her seed.
Phosphorescent seas collapse on broken shingle spits to sing
Of lost atolls, of mattocked rings of brittle rock
And henges built of mushrooms in the close-grazed faery ring.
The husks lie shattered on the moss, the gnats have long since flown,
Attercop spins deadly wheels, there is no cricket wing,
The open rides of lovers’ hopes are long since overgrown.
She does not trust the traveller, the rider on the ridge,
She has no faith in whispered words, the secret tryst or pledge,
She will not stride the open plains or creep along the ledge.
She does not trust the stay-at-home, nor the fly-by-night,
She has no faith in song and dance, the contract or the fight,
She takes no comfort from the wren nor fears the eagle in full flight.
She is the witch of borderland, she is the sage of time,
She is the aged Sybil, midwife of the troubled mind,
She is the orphaned wanderer with no family, hound nor kine.
On a skiff of gilded darkness crafted from a lizards skin
She searches for companionship in dank ditches, rilles and brook ,
She rests, bewildered, longing for her now ancestral kin.
The heavy musk of twilight revisits her again.
In loss she finds acquaintance with the peace she craves
To drift to immolation like moths to candle flame.
“And it is yet permitted me to rend
The veil of mortal frailty, that the spirit,
Clothed in its changeless purity, may know
How soonest to accomplish the great end
For which it hath its being, and may taste
That peace which in the end all life will share.”
Queen Mab – Percy Bysshe Shelley
© Martin Porter 2008
This poem is unpublished, but has been submitted for publication in a proposed collection. Written in 2008, it has been read to the innominate writing group based in Jersey, C.I., and also to an informal group of writers in Whangarei, N.Z.
The central character, Queen Mab, is a mythical figure. The epigraph is from Mercutio's speech in Romeo and Juliet Act 1 Scene 4, and is sometimes curtailed from some transcripts. The postscript is from Percy Bysse Shelley's "Queen Mab" which can be found at http://www.bartleby.com/139/shel111.html. A further reference is Richard Dadd's great painting "The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke", held in the Tate Gallery, London and imaged at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Image-Dadd_-_Fairy_Feller%27s.jpg. Mab can be seen as an English fairy, but this does not quite mean a cute flying girl in a fluffy white dress, but more along the rather wild and ambivalent figures often portrayed in European stories such as those told by the Grimm brothers. There are often elements of madness associated with faery, and it is noteworthy that the patricide Dadd painted "The Fairy Feller's Master Stroke" while incarcerated in Bedlam. Mercutio's state of mind was not at its clearest in his "Queen Mab" speech. Elements of chaos are also present in Dunsany's "The King of Elfland's Daughter"
There are references to other works made in the poem. "Attercop" is a dialect word from Yorkshire, but was used by Bilbo Baggins to insult the spiders of Mirkwood in Tolkien's "The Hobbit". References to the phosphorescent sea could come from anyone with an experience of planktonic phosphorescence, but is, in fact, based on a passage from Sheldon Vanauken's "A Severe Mercy". The moths' drift to immolation is a lingering memory from Robert Way's "The Garden of the Beloved". There are also major elements of the unhappy tension between Lirazal and her love for her homeland, Alveric and her son Orion and the resulting disorder in Lord Dunsany's " The King of Elfland's Daughter" included in the poem. Tennyson's Lady of Shalott is present in her skiff. The mystical Sybil of Cumae is also added to the mix, who, according to legend, made an unfortunately thoughtless wish for longevity and lived to wither away, until only her voice was left.
These varied references make Pasifika Queen Mab a difficult poem, which often seems to cause confusion. The epigraph and postscript offer clues, but the allusions to niche works require particular knowledge. There are issues in how much this should intrude into understanding the poem, and how much the poem should be able to be a self-contained whole. Hopefully the background knowledge enhances the poem and is not an essential to the narrative. Perhaps because of its central character, Pasifika Queen Mab may be seen as a "childrens' poem". It is not intended as such, nor is it suitable as such. Our concept of "fairy" has changed substantially from the more indimidating concept of the supernatural and unseen world of the past.
The structure of Pasifika Queen Mab is designed to enhance the "magic" element of the poem. The verse structure is based around the "lucky number", 3. It consists of three lines in each stanza, with nine ie: 3x3 stanzas. There is an element of the inverted pyramid, with the nine stanzas being split into a four stanza scene-setting, a three stanza "incantation" and a two stanza conclusion. The stanzas of the introduction scene and conclusion have an aba rhyming structure, but the incantation has an aaa rhyming structure, to emphasise the magical concept of an incantation, as if some charm was being recited to bring Queen Mab into the conscious world. The incantation is distinguished by each line starting with Queen Mab herself, in the word "She".
Likewise, the language is chosen to reflect a world of half-light, dankness, decay, heavy scents and inhuman life forms. A sense of weariness, loss, loneliness, mistrust, regret and detachment from ancestry is injected into the poem, sometimes directly, sometimes by implication due to the choice of words. A sense of anger or fear is avoided by careful use of language to emphasise the sense of resignation, perhaps depression
Pasifika Queen Mab
“This is the hag, when maids lie on their backs,
That presses them and learns them first to bear,
Making them women of good carriage:”
Romeo and Juliet
Doping nocturnal moths, dry and empty in their brown winged shells,
The densely sweetened perfume of manuka hugs the ground
Insinuating through the dreams of wood-wasp in their paper cells.
As day gives up her irksome work the dark womb meets her need
And sultry through the musky heat the moon rests in her cup
And counts each starry glimmer as her seed.
Phosphorescent seas collapse on broken shingle spits to sing
Of lost atolls, of mattocked rings of brittle rock
And henges built of mushrooms in the close-grazed faery ring.
The husks lie shattered on the moss, the gnats have long since flown,
Attercop spins deadly wheels, there is no cricket wing,
The open rides of lovers’ hopes are long since overgrown.
She does not trust the traveller, the rider on the ridge,
She has no faith in whispered words, the secret tryst or pledge,
She will not stride the open plains or creep along the ledge.
She does not trust the stay-at-home, nor the fly-by-night,
She has no faith in song and dance, the contract or the fight,
She takes no comfort from the wren nor fears the eagle in full flight.
She is the witch of borderland, she is the sage of time,
She is the aged Sybil, midwife of the troubled mind,
She is the orphaned wanderer with no family, hound nor kine.
On a skiff of gilded darkness crafted from a lizards skin
She searches for companionship in dank ditches, rilles and brook ,
She rests, bewildered, longing for her now ancestral kin.
The heavy musk of twilight revisits her again.
In loss she finds acquaintance with the peace she craves
To drift to immolation like moths to candle flame.
“And it is yet permitted me to rend
The veil of mortal frailty, that the spirit,
Clothed in its changeless purity, may know
How soonest to accomplish the great end
For which it hath its being, and may taste
That peace which in the end all life will share.”
Queen Mab – Percy Bysshe Shelley
© Martin Porter 2008
This poem is unpublished, but has been submitted for publication in a proposed collection. Written in 2008, it has been read to the innominate writing group based in Jersey, C.I., and also to an informal group of writers in Whangarei, N.Z.
Thursday, August 26, 2010
On seeing a newspaper picture of Sir Thomas Bouch - language and themes
There is a progression from the actual newspaper picture to the Great Tay Bridge disaster and finally the consequences. To maintain this narrative, the language has to work hard, defining themes and flow.
The repetition of "one black spot" defines two of the main themes - spots and blackness. The choice of these two themes evolves naturally from the double meaning of the phrase - the black mark on a supposedly spotless career , and the spots that make up a newspaper picture. There are other meanings as well - the black gap in the collapsed bridge, and the specks of soot and printers ink make a pivotal point in the poem.
Other themes are present in the poem. The "ordained plan" casts a shadow over the events, and the Tay Bridge disaster could be seen as preordained because of the poor construction techniques used in building the bridge. The epigraph is not just ornamental, but fits into the theme of pre-ordination, with McGonnagal's moralising echoing the Victorian religious ethos of "pride comes before a fall".
The transitory nature of human achievement is another theme - "like his famous bridge, the glorious knight falls quickly" and "constructed glory smudges away" like newspaper ink on the fingers of the readers. The final note of explanation also concentrates on Bouch's success bringing a note of irony and perhaps a more sympathetic look at his career. The reader has to research to link the poem to the historical event which is not mentioned at all by name in the poem. Well, not everything can be made easy!
The title of the poem indicates its primary subject is Bouch and the picture, not the Tay Bridge disaster. The poem concentrates on the picture, its construction and printing. It also concentrates on the effects of the disaster on Bouch - the "bloodshot eye", the grey face, the grief and shame, which eventually leads to his death. The pivotal point in the poem that links these two topics is the phrase "the locomotive sound of printing press". Here the language is working hard, and again in the "ink black gap", a hard sounding little phrase bringing the disaster back to the photograph, and the wihrlpools which immediately follow, moving on to Bouch.
More details and the photograph that inspired the poem can be found at http://www.kosmoid.net/technology/bouch .
The repetition of "one black spot" defines two of the main themes - spots and blackness. The choice of these two themes evolves naturally from the double meaning of the phrase - the black mark on a supposedly spotless career , and the spots that make up a newspaper picture. There are other meanings as well - the black gap in the collapsed bridge, and the specks of soot and printers ink make a pivotal point in the poem.
Other themes are present in the poem. The "ordained plan" casts a shadow over the events, and the Tay Bridge disaster could be seen as preordained because of the poor construction techniques used in building the bridge. The epigraph is not just ornamental, but fits into the theme of pre-ordination, with McGonnagal's moralising echoing the Victorian religious ethos of "pride comes before a fall".
The transitory nature of human achievement is another theme - "like his famous bridge, the glorious knight falls quickly" and "constructed glory smudges away" like newspaper ink on the fingers of the readers. The final note of explanation also concentrates on Bouch's success bringing a note of irony and perhaps a more sympathetic look at his career. The reader has to research to link the poem to the historical event which is not mentioned at all by name in the poem. Well, not everything can be made easy!
The title of the poem indicates its primary subject is Bouch and the picture, not the Tay Bridge disaster. The poem concentrates on the picture, its construction and printing. It also concentrates on the effects of the disaster on Bouch - the "bloodshot eye", the grey face, the grief and shame, which eventually leads to his death. The pivotal point in the poem that links these two topics is the phrase "the locomotive sound of printing press". Here the language is working hard, and again in the "ink black gap", a hard sounding little phrase bringing the disaster back to the photograph, and the wihrlpools which immediately follow, moving on to Bouch.
More details and the photograph that inspired the poem can be found at http://www.kosmoid.net/technology/bouch .
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