More lasting than themselves

I'm writing notes for a programme for the ladies' choir I conduct. Something that strikes me over and over again is how often a published but extremely minor poet, a poet who is now all but forgotten (except perhaps on Wikipedia), has managed to survive longer into the future than might otherwise have been the case, because one or two of his or her poems were set to music. By a much more famous composer.

The songs I'm thinking of are mostly from the British art song period - from the very late 19th century into the first few decades of the 20th, but the same thing applies to much German lieder. The composers are remembered, and there's information about them online - often at length. But the poets are almost entirely forgotten, in spite of having produced reams of poetry, or twenty or thirty novels, or various other writings in their lifetime. And even if the poets are still visible online, their work is forgotten: a mere list of names of books that few libraries would have copies of.

Billy Collins wrote a delightful poem called Marginalia, about the sorts of things that people scribble in the margins of books. In one stanza he writes:

Even Irish monks in their cold scriptoriajotted along the borders of the Gospelsbrief asides about the pains of copying,a bird singing near their window,or the sunlight that illuminated the page -anonymous men hitching a ride into the future on a vessel more lasting than themselves. 

Those last two lines are apt for what I've written above: like those Irish monks, the names of the poets would be forgotten if it wasn't for the vessel, the composer (or perhaps the song), being more lasting than themselves. 

Piece de resistance

When I was acting recently in the play, Hamp, I used an old book of poems by Robert Browning as my character's 'prayer book.' (I played a military padre.) I looked at the poems in odd moments during rehearsals: they were laid out in two columns per page, dense and in smallish print, and there were pages and pages of them. Perhaps a couple of hundred pages. Some of them were Browning's long dramatic poems which I think were intended for stage performance.

I'm not sure whether it was as a result of this that I looked a bit further into the poems written by Browning's wife, Elizabeth Barrett Browning. Like her husband's poems, these seemed to me to have a kind of dated air about them, though some of them are still highly regarded.

Recently my son alerted me to the book, The War of Art, by Steven Pressfield, and I read it - very quickly, because it has one basic point and that's repeated in a variety of ways. But essentially it's about the need for artists to overcome the resistance to doing creative work; procrastination is a great bugbear for many artistic workers, and can excused on the grounds of 'writer's block' or other pseudonyms.

Shortly after this I began reading Margaret Forster's excellent and detailed biography of Elizabeth Barrett. It's long and there have been times I've been tempted to give up on it, but it's so well written that it's quite hard to put it down. Barrett suffered ill-health during much of her youth and early womanhood; possibly it was a major bronchial issue that was never properly dealt with. She traded on it to a degree, making herself something of a recluse in her own household, and excusing herself from going out because she was too 'frail' to exercise (the frailty was encouraged by her doctors, regrettably). It became a bit of a vicious circle, aided by her own father overdoing his concerns for her, and allowing her to keep herself from other people.

But Barrett also used this time to establish herself as a poet, and to learn, and to communicate (mostly by letter) with other writers. She published some poetry and made a small name for herself. This style of life continued well into her thirties and then her life changed substantially. By this time her mother had died suddenly and at least two of her brothers had also died, and her father's personality had become increasingly possessive of his remaining children. He refused to allow any of them to marry - though in due course some managed to.

Elizabeth began a correspondence with Robert Browning, and began to meet him secretly at her home when her father was out. (Browning never met his father-in-law face-to-face, amazingly.) In due course they made plans to be married, secretly, and after the marriage fled the country, going to Italy, where the climate was much more congenial to Elizabeth's health.

At this point, things on the poetry front became most odd. Here were two major poets living together with plenty of time on their hands in a country where they knew very few people, and where they had little in the way of domestic duties to contend with, yet they spent the first decade or more of their marriage barely writing a word of poetry! It seems extraordinary; they made excuses about one thing or another putting them off from working, and at times did make efforts to work, but very little was produced.

Browning had never had a real job in his life - his parents had subsidised him at home in London; Barrett, of course, being a woman in a well-to-do family, had never been required to work either. She had almost no domestic skills (Browning wasn't much better) and relied almost entirely on a long-suffering personal maid (who eventually also became the nanny to the Brownings' one and only child) to look after their every need. Their life-style was funded by some ongoing payments Elizabeth received in relation to a ship an uncle owned, and small amounts from their books, and an annual sum paid to them by a friend.

There was every opportunity to produce great poetry during this time, and yet both of them fell into the trap that Pressfield talks about. They put off the work continually, in spite of having no excuses for not working. Even when their one and only child came along, they were still molly-coddled in terms of actually looking after the child's physical needs: first a wet-nurse suckled the boy until he was well into his second year, and the maid, Wilson, basically cared for him in the day-to-day. Worse, Elizabeth was excessively indulgent of the boy, and even Robert regarded her mothering of him as most peculiar.

The moral of the story? If you have talent, don't waste it by procrastinating. You only have so long on this planet. Make the most of what you've given and use it.

Toes poems

Hopefully it's getting a bit late in the year to be worrying about having cozy toes - more likely the sandals and jandals will be coming out of hiding, if they haven't already. The last week or so has had some lovely days, and hopefully there'll be more, though as always, the weather people are forecasting something drastic for us.

Thinking about toes, I thought I'd check out my Evernote clippings to see what came up on that subject.  Surprisingly enough, while there were a few references to that common expression - kept me on my toes - most of the notes referred me back to poems I'd collected, including a link to one of my own. I can quote this one, since I own the copyright. Here's the bit about toes - it comes from a poem called Lying on my side:

Toes keep pace with the quietly shifting space:

those toes (unlike the ankles) soft and less defined,

grubs of differing heights set as extremities,

shift around each other, nuzzling in amongst each other,

comfort spaces betwixt between, sensuous with each other,

revelling in their sockless, shoeless freedom.

There's a nice bit about toes in a poem called Night Rains, San Diego, 2012.  The poem is by Tim Pfau: 

We sailed together, so clever and deft,

occasionally dipping our toes in

hurt, seasoning brightness and space with salt.

You can read the full poem on the Canopic Jar website.

Don Walls has his own website, and there are samples of his poems scattered over several pages. Aspects of my toes is a delightful short poem which you can read in full on the page that has some poems from his book Down the Lane. Just scroll down the page a little, until you find this poem.

Toes only get the briefest of mentions in John Updike's Seven Stanzas at Easter, but the poem is so good, I advise you to read it in full. He looks at the realness of the body Jesus rose in (the same hinged thumbs and toes...)

Finally, Dorianne Laux, in a poem called Antilamentation, also notes briefly a point about toes - and the way the person addressed in the poem has shoes that crimped her toes. It's a poem that suggests we should regret nothing, though I leave it up to you to discover whether that's good or bad advice from the poet.

This photo comes from a post on the KCBakes website, and discusses teal toes. Apparently teal is the official colour of ovarian cancer. There are a couple of other toe pictures there too.

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.

Concert tomorrow - background notes

Just been doing a run-through of all the pieces for the concert tomorrow - that is, everything I've got to play. It's a curious thing that at this stage of the game things that have never gone wrong before suddenly go wrong, added, of course, to the things that are already not quite going right. It's most disconcerting, but something you have to live with.

Yesterday I printed out the programmes (while cooking tea, incidentally), and got some background information on the various poets who wrote the texts for the songs we're doing. Some intriguing stuff came out of this. The poem by Anne Sexton - Welcome Morning - is a lovely piece with a great sense of refreshment and joy in the small ordinary things of the day. Yet Sexton was in and out of depression from her late twenties, attempted suicide more than once, and finally committed suicide in her mid-forties - after having tidied everything up for her publishers.

Helena Henderson (also known as Helena France, and sometimes as Paul Henderson!) was a New Zealand poet whose Catholic father was so opposed to her marrying a non-Catholic that he feigned suicide the night before the wedding! She went ahead with the wedding, however, and for the first three years of the marriage she and her husband lived on a yacht he'd built. It was moored in Lyttelton Harbour, and she used to row him to work every morning.

Ain't people's lives intriguing?