A sneeze in a redhaired nostril

Continuing on with my interest in odd words, or the odd combinations of ordinary words, I'm looking briefly today at trailer hitches before I go on to look at some of the ways Les Murray uses words in a poem called Flowering Eucalypt in Autumn. 
 
Here are some of the single words and combinations of trailer hitching words: multi-fit receiver hitches,  goosenecks, pintles, receiver mount combination ball, switch balls, folding ball gooseneck hitch, (or even better) underbed folding ball gooseneck hitch, universal fifth wheel base rails, adjustable eyes and enforcement collars.   The mind boggles - even more at a weld-on pocket anchor.   Just think of welding an anchor into your pocket, and you see what I mean.  There's ample material here for a poem, I think!

So onto a real poem.   In Murray's poem he's doing what he often does, piling metaphor upon metaphor to try and show the enormity of a small or ordinary-seeming thing (as he does with some humour in Shower, one of my favourite poems.)

In this poem, the crimson blossoms are dropping to the ground:
....a napped rug
of eyelash drift, of blooms flared
like a sneeze in a redhaired nostril. 

They're:
minute urns, pinch-sized rockets
knocked down by....
....the daily
parrot gang with green pocketknife wings. 

....each flower comes 
as a spray in its own turned vase,
a taut starburst, honeyed model 
of the tree's fragrance crisping in your head. 

Finally:
a tower of fabulous swish tatters,
a map hoisted upright, a crusted
riverbed with up-country show towns.

Quoting bits like this doesn't do justice to the poem, so it's worth reading it as a whole.   Nevertheless, a sneeze in a redhaired nostril certainly lingers in the mind....!

I mentioned the other day about the copyright issues relating to copying poems into blogs and onto the Net.  It doesn't seem to be that big an issue, since any Les Murray poem I've gone looking for in order to provide a link to the full poem has been readily available online.   Perhaps the Net is the best thing to happen to poetry in all that art's history....?

New Poet Laureate

Ian Wedde is the next New Zealand Poet Laureate.

I used to work with Ian way back in the 70s, when we were both posties (postmen, to the uninitiated). I don't know that we ever had much to do with each other - it was the musicians among the posties who tended to clan together rather than the poets....although I had gotten to know another poet, Brent Southgate, when I was a postie before I went to England - back in the 60s. He's the brother of the well-known conductor, Bill Southgate, who I knew a little earlier on here in Dunedin music circles, and who coincidentally arrived back in NZ on the same day that my wife and I did, when I returned from England. Both of us stood listening to a race commentary on the radio, having forgotten the unique quality of that NZ sound.

There, that'll do for the name-dropping today.

I've read Wedde's poetry in the past and it hasn't greatly appealed, but either he's moved on from the kind of poetry that didn't appeal to me, or I've moved on....his Harry Martens is typically Wedde in its use of language yet more readable than what I remember from the past. Perhaps solid doses of denser Les Murray poems over the years have made me more aware of what Wedde's doing, and maybe it's time to come to him afresh.

Whyte, Murray, Words, Poetry

David Whyte is a poet I'm unfamiliar with (it's not hard to be unfamiliar with poets - there are so many of them!), but he was quoted as saying the following in a blog post I read today: “A poet’s work is all about creating a language that is big enough to represent both the world you inhabit and the next, larger world that awaits you."

I'm currently revising the poem, Poetry and Religion, by Les Murray. Revising as in re-committing it to memory, something I have to do every so often in order to remind my brain that I've once learnt something and expect it still to be there somewhere. (I'm using a little digital dictaphone I bought for another purpose recently to re-learn the poems and Scripture I've memorised previously: it's a different kind of challenge to learning from a page of words.)

Murray's poem discusses a similar idea to Whyte's statement, though perhaps from a more theological perspective. Like many of Murray's poems, it takes a bit of unpacking to get to the gist of things, especially as he can make use of ordinary words and give them additional meanings: 'concert', 'attracted', for instance. And the section where he uses the 'mirror' imagery is quite dense until you work over it a number of times....for me, anyway.

Here it is in full.

Religions are poems. They concert
our daylight and dreaming mind, our
emotions, instinct, breath and native gesture

into the only whole thinking: poetry.
Nothing's said till it's dreamed out in words
and nothing's true that figures in words only.

A poem, compared with an arrayed religion,
may be like a soldier's one short marriage night
to die and live by. But that is a small religion.

Full religion is the large poem in loving repetition;
like any poem, it must be inexhaustible and complete
with turns where we ask Now why did the poet do that?

You can't pray a lie, said Huckleberry Finn;
you can't poe one either. It is the same mirror;
mobile, glancing, we call it poetry,

fixed centrally, we call it religion,
and God is the poetry caught in any religion,
caught, not imprisoned. Caught as in a mirror

that he attracted, being in the world as poetry
is in the poem, a law against its closure.
There'll always be religion around while there is poetry

or a lack of it. Both are given, and intermittent,
as the action of those birds - crested pigeon, rosella parrot -
who fly with wings shut, then beating, and again shut.

I love those two lines:
Nothing's said till it's dreamed out in words
and nothing's true that figures in words only.

It seems like a simple couple of statements, yet it has a hidden depth like a pool that you think is shallow - you step into it, lose your footing and suddenly find yourself floundering.

Books started and unfinished this year so far

The Finkler Question – Howard Jacobson – good writing, and lots of subtlety in the story, but I got fed up with the crudity of it. Equally, there didn't seem to be any real forward movement.

For All that has been Thanks – Rowan Williams and Joan Chittister - read several chapters; some of the early ones okay, but overall it’s far too lightweight.

Close Calls with Nonsense (Reading New Poetry) – Stephen Burt – interesting stuff, but a lot of the poets are unfamiliar and their work isn’t very accessible. Even though it’s an American book, both James K Baxter and Les Murray appear. I might have finished this, given enough time.

A Bend in the River – V S Naipaul – 2/3 finished. Too gloomy and dour to pursue any further.

The Art Thief – Noah Charney – was about a third into it and it was just going nowhere fast; characters overdrawn and far too much ‘I know everything about my subject’ from the author.

Dancing on the Head of a Pin – Thomas Sniegoski - a sequel to a book I read a couple of years ago while in Wellington; whereas the first one was unputdownable, this one didn’t grab me at all.

Death

I've been reading a book on death and dying lately, The Undertaking. It's by Thomas Lynch; he's both an undertaker and a poet. The book looks at death in detail, and from a number of intriguing angles. I'm going to copy a few extracts from the book into this blog soon, since not only can Mr Lynch write very stylishly, he has a lot of good things to say about his topic.

Why read about death? Well, as you get older, and find you've outlived more and more people, you know that somewhere along the line, there's more than a distinct possibility that you will join them at some point. So it's useful to think about it a bit more seriously.

When you're young, you think death is so far in the future that it's not worth thinking about, or else that death is an impossibility. It could never happen to me. I suspect that more than a few young suicides think that killing themselves isn't actually a real thing; they'll wake up in the morning and carry on with their lives like they have for the last 16-20 years.

We all think like that, in a way. Unless there are definite and even disturbing signs otherwise, we all climb out of bed in the morning not in the least surprised that we have another day up our sleeves. But lurking in the back of our minds - our 65-year-old minds, anyway - is the knowledge that like it or not, we ain't gonna be here forever. It's scary, strange, uninviting, and hard to grasp. 'Death pulls towards acute dimensions' says Les Murray in one of his poems, by which I take it he means that death sharpens the mind considerably in regard to the things of this world - all that stuff we're so familiar with.

Check out the next post for an extract from Lynch.

Photo courtesy of ThomasLynch.com

The things you find on the Net

The other day, for no particular reason, I came across a thesis, entitled Images of Salvation: a study in theology, poetry and rhetoric, written by Gregory Brian Smith. And the reason I found it is that it references my old webpage at Geocities. The reference is connected to a picture of Les Murray, the Australian poet, and makes it seem as though the picture is mine.

However, when you click on the link provided, you find that it no longer goes anywhere, probably because geocities was taken over by Yahoo, and the Athens/Forum address system has been abandoned in favour of this less complicated link. I've tried to download the thesis a couple of times, but on my home computer at least, it gets stuck before it's finished loading.

However, on my old homepage you can see the picture of Les Murray that Smith references. The photo appears to have come from Duffy and Snellgrove's website, where it's featured on the page that discusses Murray, and has recordings of him reading his work. Thus is repaired the link on Mr Smith's page.

Now, driving your RV (which I have discovered means 'recreational vehicle' and can apply to anything from a live-in bus to a skateboard) across to the Continent in a fashion that shows that the next bit has nothing to do with the first - no matter how hard I might try to pin them together - and head towards Turkey, where a gameshow called Penitents Compete (or Tovbekarlar Yarisiyor in Turkish) has a Muslim Imam, a Greek Orthodox priest, a Rabbi and a Buddhist monk attempting to convert atheists to one or other of their religions.

If it sounds like a joke, it ain't. The prize is a pilgrimage to the holy place of either Mecca, Jerusalem or Tibet, depending on which religion the contestant decides to convert to. The contestants pit their unbelief against the belief of the religious regulars, and the latter will attempt to convert at least one in ten of the contestants who appear.

Does it sound in the slightest bit crass? I'd say ultra-crass would cover it. "The makers of "Penitents Compete" are unrepentant and reject claims that the show, scheduled to begin broadcasting in September, will cheapen religion." No, of course it won't cheapen religion. (Religious people are perfectly capable of cheapening religion on their own, without any help from gameshow production companies.) All it cheapens - further - is the extraordinary world of television, which its (generally-credited) inventor, John Baird Logie (looking grumpy at left) is said to have thought would bring education to the masses. His son, Malcolm Baird, Malcolm Baird said in an interview that had his father known how TV would turn out in sixty years time, he would have dropped it and turned to other inventions.