#poetscorner is a feature in which poets share a poem of theirs and discuss the inspiration behind it.
After a while, something happens to break the surface of your more or less composed life and show you yourself as a frightened child. I suspect this is true of everyone. I hope it is.
About six weeks ago, my grandmother died. Alzheimer’s and physical frailty had reduced her to the dust of a person, swept into death by a breeze of antibiotics. Painless: a very un-titanic finality. On the same day as my grandmother’s funeral, almost at the same hour, was the funeral of an acquaintance my own age. The day before she committed suicide she posted happy birthday wishes to the Facebook walls of several friends.
Grief hot and cold, anguish and melancholy. The burn of a friendship stolen from me was hot on my mind on the way to Little Missenden in Berkshire to bury my mother’s mother.
It was on this car journey that I wrote this:
so here are two at once
dead like it was nothing
what is this where to metafpuzicks
no this is synchronised diving
headgear yes but to the whyness mouthing world
ugly goldfish popping dusty guts wrenches how got it unwrapped
what bust you up torn across the face now doing what doing what what
one i knew old, one i knew young
sat into a scuff
dont look now but
the descending arse of the world
is cold spreading damp stain of arse.
one hidden one lost,
unaudience.
let’s dance over and falling until eyes turn red,
living, it is for them,
only but something.
let’s scream the cold of lungs out
and sit in warm silent black,
living, rage, ape rage and
cry a child a kinging crime
and just cry.
what else is at all,
what is there to at all?
i have forgotten if yes or no
too busy was looking at my bastard tear.
Apart from doubling the line spacing I haven’t rewritten what you just read at all. It’s consequently clumsy and I don’t even always know exactly what I wanted to say. It’s exactly a scream of confusion, fear, of anger.
On the 14th February 1957, Samuel Beckett wrote a polite letter to Eva Hesse answering thoroughly all her questions about various obscure lines in his poetry collection Echo’s Bones. About a line from Serena II – “in a hag she drops her young” – she writes, “‘Hag’ has so many meanings: a bog, a soft place in a bog, a ravine? I suppose you mean a bog as a composite of moor + toilet??”
Beckett replies: “Soft place in bog. No toilet harmonics.”
Was he right?
How is a reader like a piano?
How is a reader like a pianist?
What is a poem and how should you make one?
Why?
“…emotion recollected in tranquility…”
“A poem should not mean
But be.”
There are lots of ways to write poetry. You can do six on a clement Sunday morning. One is to take the raw ore of your emotion and hack at it until it reflects at you a little light.
Funeral
Longing of outstretched kelp,
A face pressed to the damp Saxon wall.
_____
So here are two dead as if nothing.
Metaphysics! this is synchronised diving.
_____
Memory, light through glass.
A rainbow shadow, impossible to unprism.
_____
I am so sorry that I have forgotten,
Busy looking at my bastard tear.
Frederick Spoliar
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(Image sourced from: here)