A foraging poem by Seamus Heaney

Blackberry Picking

Late August, given heavy rain and sun
For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.
At first, just one, a glossy purple clot
Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.
You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet
Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it
Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for
Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger
Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots
Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.
Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills
We trekked and picked until the cans were full
Until the tinkling bottom had been covered
With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned
Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered
With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.
We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.
But when the bath was filled we found a fur,
A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.
The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush
The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.
I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair
That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.
Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not. 

Seamus Heaney (1960ties)

Ruminating majestic reindeers

Norway! Land of difficult spelling.
Hiding your beauty behind strange vowels.
Land of long nights, short days, and dots over 'O's.
Ruminating majestic reindeers
Tread wearily on ice floes
Ever aware of what happened to the Titanic
One day I will sojourn to your shores
I live in the middle of England
But!
Norway! My soul resides in your watery fiords fyords fiiords
Inlets.

- Adrian Mole

Nothing in that drawer. [repetitive poem that does not repeat itself.]

Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.
Nothing in that drawer.

Ron Padgett (1975 or earlier)

Now this is a remarkable clever find: it is the same sentence 14 times over, yet each time it speaks of a unique event. And also: everybody knows that the sensation of opening drawers in some forgotten cupboard in an old house. I would have found the poem more realistic of furniture design if it has less drawers. 

Found this on the CD that accompanies "All Poets welcome", a book on the poetry scene of the Lower East Side in 1960ties written by Daniel Kane. The book itself is sometimes interesting but mostly drowns the good bits in academic hyperjargon that fails to explain.  

A foraging poem by Gary Snyder + commentary

Here is a poem by Gary Snyder from his book Turtle Island (1975).

ETHNOBOTANY

In June two oak fell,
rot in the roots

Chainsaw in September
in three days one tree
bucked and quartered in the shed

sour fresh inner oak-wood smell
the main trunk splits
"like opening a book" (J. Tecklin)
And slightly humping oak leaves
deer muzzle and kick it,
Boletus.
one sort, Alice Eastwood
pink and poison; 

Two yellow, edulus
"edible and choice."
only I got just so slightly sick --

Taste all, and hand the knowledge down.

Commentary 

* The entire poem is an allusion to Ezra Pound's "The flavors of the peach and the apricot are not lost from generation to generation. Neither are they transmitted by book learning."

* Quoting Snyder from the same volume: "Know the flowers." 

* Know the flowers, by what name? And which system?

* Can there exist a botany without books & book learning?   

* Foragers only trust other foragers who have tried things for themselves. Who know the where and the what and the how of plants.

* All foragers all moralists.

* All botany is ethnobotany / all botany is culture. 

* Find your own flavours and hand them down to the next generation.

* "I must create a system or be enslaved by another man's." - William Blake

Lines in praise of a self-chiming clock

Lines in Praise of a Self-Chiming Clock

The skill originated in the West,
But, by learning, we can achieve the artifice:
Wheels move and time turns round,
Hands show the minutes as they change.
 
Red-capped watchmen, there's no need to announce dawn's coming.
My golden clock has warned me of the time.
By first light I am hard at work,
And keep on asking, "Why are the memorials late?"

Quoted from 'Emperor of China, self-portrait of K'ang Hsi' by Jonathan D. Spence. Hsi was a Qing dynasty (so Manchu and not Han, open to the world rather than self-absorbed and arrogant) emperor who reigned from 1661 to 1722. This is not a real autobiography but one synthesized from loose fragments. It's totally Poundian (as in Ezra Pound) showing the wise leader in deliberation about his tasks. The poems (c. 1705) shows the enduring prestige of poetry (and calligraphy) and it also documents a humorous (?) response from the emperor himself to the implications of radical new technology.

Two editions of EhtnoPoetics' grand grimoire

My copy of "Technicians of the Sacred", the big book of ethnopoetics compiled by Jerome Rothenberg, is the revised and  expanded edition of 1985. I never liked the book: it's big as you expect, but overweight, the font slightly too large, the pages too white and too white-spaced. Not nice to read and the cover is not very appealing either (down right ugly more like!). Now I have purchased a cheap paperback edition in original edition (Anchor 1969). The cover is much better, the pages of better size but it is almost as big physically despite lacking an entire section. There are 522 pages in the first edition against 636 pages in the second. To my pleasant surprise the revised edition offers major changes which means that I am not just owning two editions of the same book but that I own 2 books that overlap for maybe... only ...80% or even 70%?? It means that a hypothetical aggregate editions of this book would be 1000 pages! And still no material from the Amazon would be included! Comparison shows another problem with this book: the selection for inclusion of material appears even more random than it already did. There is no other book that I like so much and yet find fault with in such large degree. I won't go over it again but the change in material between these two books I find impossible to explain in quality. It could be that the new edition draws in more exotica but only marginally. It's a poetry book and it's a manifesto of a poetic movement and in that light you can possible step over many problems but the apparent random selection of texts points to problem of literary merit: there is so much stuff compiled here from all ages and all places and Technician of the Sacred throws them all together without much digestion or understanding of the original purpose of the material or even the beauty of the language or the originality of the images. 

Complaining about ethnopoetics is one of the great joys of ethnopoetics.

Notes From a Pioneer on a Speck in Space

Lew Welch is one of many lesser known beat poets who were present at the some of the key events that constitute the 'beat legend'. He wrote beautifully and knew a lot of sadness. Welch disappeared in 1971, he left a suicide note but his body has never been found. Shortly after his already selected collected poetry appeared and in 2012 this was reissued by City Lights with a bunch of B-sides: poems not in the original (for good reason) and a "statement of poetics" Welch's observation on language and poetic language (very original, brilliant). I am not a great reader of poetry (I like bits of Kerouac, Ginsberg I find nearly unpalatable, Snyder only of mild interest, McClure hopelessly pretentious, Waldman a fake) but here I have found a voice to cherish. Google books has a preview. Only a zombie can ignore the silent beauty of this:

Notes From a Pioneer on a Speck in Space

Few things that grow here poison us.
Most of the animals are small.
Those big enough to kill us do it in a way
Easy to understand, easy to defend against.
The air, here, is just what the blood needs.
We don’t use helmets or special suits.

The Star, here, doesn’t burn you if you
Stay outside as much as you should.
The worst of our winters is bearable.
Water, both salt and sweet, is everywhere.
The things that live in it are easily gathered.
Mostly, you eat them raw with safety and pleasure.

Yesterday my wife and I brought back
Shells, driftwood, stones, and other curiosities
Found on the beach of the immense
Fresh-water Sea we live by.
She was all excited by a slender white stone which:
“Exactly fits the hand!”

I couldn’t share her wonder;
Here, almost everything does.

And this poem about a plant also deserves to be quoted in the context of this blog (how can you come up with the idea to write about a plant like this!!):

Skunk Cabbage

1
Slowly in the swamps unfold
great yellow petals of a
savage thing, a
tropic thing-

While no stilt-legged birds watch,
no monkey screams,
those great yellow petals
unfold.

2
Rank plant.

Pao Chao's cryptoforest

In about the year 459 Pao Chao wrote the "Wu-ch'eng fu", "rhapsody on a ruined city". The city is Kuang-Ling, modern day Yangchow, portrayed after its sacking. First it describes the city in its full splendour, then, after its fall ("divided like a melon, shared like beans") we are described scenes of the cryptoforested town. The Fu ends with the melancholy touch the western reader expect from Chinese poetry. The bit that interest me (coming from this PDF) is the portrayal of the city after nature has taken over. I think of this as a condensed version of Jefferies first chapter of After London.

Wet moss clings to the wells,
Wild vines entangle the paths.
The halls are arrayed with vipers and venomous beetles;
By the stairways deer and flying squirrels contend.
Wood sprites and mountain demons,
40 Field rats and wall foxes,
Howl in the wind, shriek in the rain,
Appear at dusk, flee at dawn.
Hungry hawks sharpen their beaks;
Winter kites hoot at young birds.
45 Crouching leopards, lurking tigers,
Suckle blood, sup on flesh.
Fallen thickets block the road;
Dark and desolate is the ancient highway.
White poplars early shed their leaves;
Wild grasses prematurely wither.
Bitter and biting is the frosty air;
Raging and roaring is the mighty wind.
A lone tumbleweed rolls by itself;
Blown sand flies of its own accord.
Dense bushes darkly stretch without end;
Thick copses wildly join one to another.
The surrounding moat already had been levelled;
The lofty turrets too have fallen.
Looking straight ahead for a thousand leagues and beyond,
All one sees is yellow dust rising.

There is another translation by Chen and Bullock that I find more to my taste because it names species and seems more ecological precise.

Duckweed flourishes in the wells
And brambles block the road.
Skunks and snakes dwell on sacred altars
While muskdeer and squirrels quarrel on marble steps.
In rain and wind,
Wood elves, mountain ghosts,
Wild rats and foxes
   Yawp and scream from dusk to dawn
Hungry hawks clash their beaks 
As cold owls frighten the chicks in their nests.
Tigers and leopards hide and wait
   for a draught of blood
   and a feast of flesh
Fallen tree-trunks lie lifelessly across
Those once busy highways.
Aspens have long ceased to rustle 
And grass dies yellow
In this harsh frosty air
Which grows into a cruelly cold wind.
A solitary reed shakes and twists,
And grains of sand, like startled birds,
   are looking for a safe place to settle.
Bushes and creepers, confused and tangled,
   seem to know no boundaries.
They pull down walls
And fill up moats.
And beyond a thousand miles
Only brown dust flies.

The journal for the protection of all beings

"The journal for the protection of all beings" was published as the fall 1978 issue of Stewart Brand's CoEvolution Quaterly. The Journal was edited by Lawrence Ferlinghetti, Michael McLure, Gary Snyder (all present at the Six Gallery poetry reading that launched the Beats to the world) and David Meltzer. This publication therefore connects 50 years of West Coast experimentation from beat and anarchist Buddhism to the merry pranksters and early internet happenings. "The journal for the protection of all beings" takes a US Buddhist long view of death and destruction, from the Atom bomb and plutonium fear to the mass extinctions of biological species and human cultures. It brings together a fascinating range of material, a liberal sprinkling of poetry (it all reads great and actually works in the context), positional essays and a few very nice bits about the subjectivity of (linguistic, anthropological) field work. It shows the Beats not as a bunch of Benzedrine fuelled hobo hitch-hikers but as a serious,engaged and inclusive group of people working towards a sustained and coherent non-ideological critique of civilization. The journal is a fascinating document that is well structured and builds up nicely with each new contribution, but, despite myself, I can't really love it. It suffers from an overdose of Buddhist zeal, those poets are self-converted choir boys for a alien faith. Maybe I am missing something that would add a little concreteness to the meta-meaning this journal is hoping to generate bottom-up. Still: it's a thing to cherish and the Gary Snyder essay on Chinese poetry is a brilliant piece that I had not read before and which alone was well worth the 8 dollar the thing cost me on Ebay.

The lives of artists are as boring as any other life

"Over the past four centuries there has been too much emphasis on the life and personality of authors - great streams of reminiscence, biography and autobiography. In fact the lives of writers are not greatly different from the lives of plumbers; except that, in the romantic age,  writers stuck poses and behaved in wild eccentric ways - not so much because those aberrations were a part of their nature but because the public expected it of them: "true genius is to madness near allied". In the late nineteenth century no poet or artist was genuine unless he broke most of the social rules, steeped himself in drink and laudanum, got syphilis or consumption, fled to wild barren places of the earth, manned barricades, was alternately in a trough or on a crest of the spirit, flirted with the demonic and the angelic (or both). It seems to me that under all the masks, the lives of artists are as boring and also as uniquely fascinating as any or every other life." - Gordon Mackay Brown (For these islands I sing, 1997)

Gordon Mackay Brown was a writer from Stromness in Orkney, the son of a postman and a student of Edwin Muir. These are all good credentials.

 

 

Where is the #occupoetry ? [Draft 3]

1) October 25th

So where is the #poetry in #occupywallstreet (yes, the #occupoetry (or maybe #occupyoetry?))?

I am asking because while people are wondering what the soundtrack to the worldwide occupation movement might be, nobody seems to care what literature #ows cites as inspirational and what literature its poets and writers aspire to produce. The only thing comes to mind is Alan Moore's comic 'V for Vendetta' that inspired the Guy Fawkes masks, regular seen at occupy demonstrations, as worn by sympathizers of Anonymous.

So, you are camping for weeks or months on some godforsaken square with your friends who, like yourself, are becoming more scruffy everyday. What do you do in the evening hours when nothing much is happening: you sing. That is how it has always been, and I like to believe that originally poetry was exactly that: words to music, language measured to a rhythm, inspirational speeches given over a camp fire. Poetry originates itself - if the conditions are there. Robert Graves for instance spoke about the ground mind composing poetry in the trenches of WWI. Poetry is about expressing sentiments and emotions direct and from the heart. Objectivity, critical distance, (and perhaps even rationality itself?) belong to prose. Poetry exists in the moment and the moment for all those people on all those squares is now.  

When I saw the video of Slavoj Zizek's speech at #ows I was completely overawed with the use of the 'human microphone' or 'human megaphone' principle where the people in the front rows repeat the speaker. What a powerful way of imprinting a written text on a human mind. You can imagine some unknown poet reciting from memory a song he or she composed while his audience repeats it phrase after phrase, writing it on their souls for ever (with Gilgamesh or the Rig Veda as a 'product' thousand years later).  In our own time Allen Ginsberg marvelled about the capability of Aboriginal songman to indefinitely remember large amounts of text heard only once. 

Poetry is about mind control and I would love to see one voicing her or himself through the human megaphone. 

2) November 9th

But there is poetry at occupy (and poets at Occupy). I just missed a local poet at the Occupy Utrecht festival while the librarian of #ows has collected an Occupy Wallstreet Poetry Anthology that exists as three ring bound volumes with poetry emailed to them by amateurs and pro's alike. Here is what he writes:

Poetry illuminates the soul of Occupy Wall St. A lot of people are asking, “What are the demands” and the poets voices show just how nuanced the human spirit and impossible a set of demands truly is. This occupation is about transforming consciousness and the poetry community is a major part of that process. 

To read it you have to visit the people's library. There is also a weekly poetry reading sessions on Friday evenings. I do not know if the human megaphone comes into action.  Strictly speaking it is not yet #occupoetry in the hard definition but that can only be a question of time.


3) December 13th

Ows at Zuccotti is evicted, perhaps for the better perhaps, ready to move elsewhere, occupying houses, finding spaces, learning new things and forms of living together, away from the prying eyes of the media.

There is an interesting piece in the Nation in which people's librarian William Scott has this to say:

During the raid, Stephen Boyer, a poet, friend and OWS librarian, read poems from the Occupy Wall Street Poetry Anthology (see peopleslibrary.wordpress.com) aloud directly into the faces of riot police. As they pushed us away from the park with shields, fists, billy clubs and tear gas, I stood next to Stephen and watched while he yelled poetry at the top of his lungs into the oncoming army of riot police. Then, something incredible happened. Several of the police leaned in closer to hear the poetry. They lifted their helmet shields slightly to catch the words Stephen was shouting out to them, even while their fellow cops continued to stampede us. The next day, an officer who was guarding the entrance to Zuccotti Park told Stephen how touched he was by the poetry, how moved he was to see that we cared enough about words and books that we would risk violent treatment and arrest just to defend our love of books and the wisdom they contain.

4) January 11

http://www.occupypoetry.net/

We grub the first fern shoots

From the SAS Survival Guide to the contemporary art practise of Urbanibalism foraging is at least in part considered as a source of famine food, a practise reinvented as the last resort when all other avenues of acquiring food have broken down. Surely every enduring culture must have produced songs, poem and stories that laments the sorrows of hunger and remembers the kind of grasses and weeds that sustained the people through the ordeal. I welcome suggestions to more because the only example I can think of that uses foraging (picking young fern shoots) both as an indication of bad fortune and as an indicator of time passing (grubbing old fern shoots) is the poem that opens Ezra Pound's Cathay (1915), his legendary collection of 'translations from the Chinese'. Song of the Bowman of Shu was written in the 11th century by Bunno, the Japanese name of Wen-Wang, the King Wen of the I Ching. Here is some additional stuff about the edibility of ferns.

SONG OF THE BOWMAN OF SHU
Here we are, picking the first fern-shoots
And saying: When shall we get back to our country?
Here we are because we have the Ken-nin for our foemen,
We have no comfort because of these Mongols.
We grub the soft fern-shoots,
When anyone says "Return," the others are full of sorrow.
Sorrowful minds, sorrow is strong, we are hungry and thirsty.
Our defence is not yet made sure, no one can let his friend return.
We grub the old fern-stalks.
We say: Will we be let to go back in October?
There is no ease in royal affairs, we have no comfort.
Our sorrow is bitter, but we would not return to our country.
What flower has come into blossom?
Whose chariot? The General's.
Horses, his horses even, are tired. They were strong.
We have no rest, three battles a month.
By heaven, his horses are tired.
The generals are on them, the soldiers are by them.
The horses are well trained, the generals have ivory arrows and
quivers ornamented with fish-skin.
The enemy is swift, we must be careful.
When we set out, the willows were drooping with spring,
We come back in the snow,
We go slowly, we are hungry and thirsty,
Our mind is full of sorrow, who will know of our grief?