11 Tuesday Oct 2016
Poetry, today. And some Kit Marlowe, for a change… But not Marlowe’s own poetry. Patricia Beer‘s The Night Marlowe Died may not be her best known poem – nor my favourite of her works – but still: Continue reading
26 Tuesday Jul 2016
Last night, after rehearsals, it was far too hot to go home – and, the rehearsals having gone passably well, we weren’t in the mood to disperse yet anyway. So we sat, more or less in the dark, in the garden of our makeshift rehearsal room. We sat in a circle, and began to tell each other the combination of Sonnets 55 and 81 that ends the play.
We all said it in turn, the game being to do it as differently as we could from the person before us. Again and again we said it… Continue reading
14 Thursday Apr 2016
Tags
And then there are the hendecasyllables.
I have this friend who got her degree and now works in another town and, while there, got herself embroiled with the local Palio. Now, you see, in Italy a palio is a kind of historical-themed competition among the neighbourhoods of a town. They have jousts, archery contests, horse races, flag-throwing, period dancing and so on, usually in beautiful costumes. Old Italian towns being what they are, the rivalry can be quite fierce… Continue reading
24 Tuesday Nov 2015
Tags
Japanese legends, Kipling Year, Poetry, Rudyard Kipling, The Coastwise Lights, The Deep-Sea Cables
Kipling wrote a good deal of poems in which the narrating “I” or “we” belongs to inanimate objects. Ships, places, pieces of equipment, mechanical parts… They come to life to describe the joys and strains of their “jobs”, history as seen through their “eyes”.
Whenever I read one of these poems, I can’t help thinking of those Japanese legends where an object takes on some sort of life by long association with and use by human beings… A concept I’ve always found highly poetic.
I wonder if Kipling knew of this legends… Continue reading
09 Thursday Jul 2015
Posted in Books, Scribbling
The Finest Story in the World has to be one of my favourite Kipling stories. It certainly was one of the first I read, many years ago, in a more than decent Italian translation, back when I still believed Kipling was just the man of the Jungle Books and Kim. Let us say that this particular short story, taken from Many Inventions, was a relevant step towards discovery. Continue reading
31 Tuesday Mar 2015
Posted in Books
For Kipling Day, a poem from the 1909 collection Actions and Reactions. It goes with the story Garm – a Hostage.
If you ever had and loved a dog – or a cat, for that matter – then you know what this is all about… Continue reading
07 Saturday Feb 2015
Posted in Stories
A little Kipling today – it’s his year, after all.
I love The Recall, a little poem taken from Action and Reactions – one of many collections of short stories and poetry.
It is a small, dream-like thing of home-coming – even when you don’t know you are coming home – and the power of place, something that, according to Peter Ackroyd, is deeply rooted in English imagination. Continue reading
13 Tuesday Jan 2015
Posted in Books
Did you know that Emily Dickinson liked to write poems on envelopes? Not just on the back of the odd stray envelope – as one might do occasionally, when an idea strikes and no notebook is at hand. No: Emily did it in a curious and deliberate way, on torn or cut pieces of envelopes…
These paper pieces survive among her manuscripts, and are usually called “scraps”. Well, scholar Christine Burgin, who studied them in depth, gave them a new name, taken from one of Emily’s poems. She calls them the Gorgeous Nothings – in the Dickinson sense of the words: Nothing as a renovating force…
Here you can read a lovely article by Jen Bervin for Poetry Foundation, and see a few images of these very meaningful scraps. Fascinating stuff.
04 Thursday Dec 2014
Posted in Stories
At times, poetry just happens.
It arrives at the right moment – whether it is when you need it, or in a way that just won’t be forgotten. If I didn’t know better, I’d be tempted tempted to think that poetry, as reading material, works under its own brand of (higly theatrical) serendipity.
Louis MacNeice happened to me one rainy evening, a few years ago, in the form of The Sunlight on the Garden – that was written in 1938, when war was looming, and all was about to change forever:
The sunlight on the garden
Hardens and grows cold,
We cannot cage the minute
Within its nets of gold,
When all is told
We cannot beg for pardon.
Our freedom as free lances
Advances towards its end;
The earth compels, upon it
Sonnets and birds descend;
And soon, my friend,
We shall have no time for dances.
The sky was good for flying
Defying the church bells
And every evil iron
Siren and what it tells:
The earth compels,
We are dying, Egypt, dying
And not expecting pardon,
Hardened in heart anew,
But glad to have sat under
Thunder and rain with you,
And grateful too
For sunlight on the garden.
Oh, the sheer feel of autumn coming, of loss, of irretrievability… I cannot read this poem without feeling the chill of that hardening sunlight.
Later I discovered that MacNeice had also been a playwright, translator and radio-drama author, and I went on to read more of his work. And yet, to me he will always be the poet of sunlight hardening on the brink of darkness, who happened to me on that one rainy night, a few years ago.
15 Saturday Feb 2014
Posted in Stories
Poetry today.
You know those times, when you come across a piece of poetry that will make you shiver with the depth and beauty and unexpectedness it employs to express something that is achingly familiar…
Well, it happened with this poem of Constantine Cavafy (here in a translation by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard – that I found thanks to Ellen Kushner.
When suddenly, at midnight, you hear
an invisible procession going by
with exquisite music, voices,
don’t mourn your luck that’s failing now,
work gone wrong, your plans
all proving deceptive—don’t mourn them uselessly.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
say goodbye to her, the Alexandria that is leaving.
Above all, don’t fool yourself, don’t say
it was a dream, your ears deceived you:
don’t degrade yourself with empty hopes like these.
As one long prepared, and graced with courage,
as is right for you who proved worthy of this kind of city,
go firmly to the window
and listen with deep emotion, but not
with the whining, the pleas of a coward;
listen—your final delectation—to the voices,
to the exquisite music of that strange procession,
and say goodbye to her, to the Alexandria you are losing.
Acknowledging defeat – in the form of a metaphysical procession in the middle of the night… ah. Beautiful. Haunting. Shiver-provoking. Didn’t you shiver?
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