London Launch of Life Lines 2

The London Launch of Life Lines 2 featured readings by Dannie Abse, Sujata Bhatt, Siobhan Campbell, Elaine Feinstein, Wayne Smith, Atilla the Stockbroker and John Hartley Williams and was held at 7pm At The Poets’ Church, St Giles in the Field, London. The collection was in aid of The Darfur Appeal. I'd say about 80-100 people showed up - and maybe 60 remained after the interval. I would have hoped for a larger, more supportive crowd (especially as the CD itself features 56 poets, and many of the poets did not appear). The church was rather cold, too - no heating on. The poets read well, though.

Deborah Kerr Has Died

The major British actor Deborah Kerr, pictured, has died. Her great period was arguably the decade between 1943 and 1953, when she appeared in some of the era's finest (and biggest) motion pictures made in England or America, such as The Life and Death of Colonel Blimp, Black Narcissus, Quo Vadis, King Solomon's Mines, and From Here To Eternity. However, for another fourteen years after that, she appeared in a few interesting, popular or significant films, such as The King and I and Casino Royale, before effectively ending her film career in 1969. As such, she worked steadily for roughly thirty years in cinema, before returning in late life to do a few roles for TV and lesser movies. Never quite an icon, she was still a star.

How To Kill Your TV Show

Prison Break, the popular American TV series now in its 3rd season, has recently made a creative decision, based on behind-the-scenes problems, that will undoubtedly destroy the show's already-perilous hopes for any future life, or viewer loyalty. They have recently killed off the character of Dr. Sara Tancredi, the main love object of tattooed protagonist Michael Scofield.

Over the first two seasons, their painful, complex relationship (based on using, being used, and getting over that) was at first enigmatic, then deeply moving, becoming the centre of an otherwise often simply ludicrous and hyper-violent spectacle. Sara was the emotional anchor of the show. Unfortunately, the actor playing her character, Sarah Wayne Callies, pictured, became, in "real life", pregnant, wanted out of the show, and refused, it is claimed, to co-operate with a third season 13-episode arc that would have had her death (one imagines) more artfully engineered.

Instead, she was unceremoniously given the literal chop - her severed head appearing in a box. This grisly homage to David Fincher or indeed Psycho may have been a funny industry in-joke for a few suits, but it has also grossly insulted the fanbase (see the blogs) and ruined any sense of past or present continuity. As one fan put it, if this series is about hope, why should I care now? TV requires a comfort zone the cinema need not offer.

Was Dr. Tancredi a John The Baptist figure? Is the "Greatest Story Ever Told" spoiled by his death at the hands of Salome? Prison Break was good TV storytelling, but it was founded on characters that the audience rooted for, and loved. With Sara gone, it is a bunch of sadists locked in a Panamanian prison. I recommend some radical script doctoring, or resurrectionary work. Make it somehow a faked death. Bring her back. Religion is based on love, and hope, and TV's mass opiate requires the chance of a second life.

Laying Claim, Laying Waste

Excuse me for being naive, but I thought Antarctica was the last best hope for "mankind" (the moon being already targeted for military expansion in future): a place no one could own, no nation could exploit. I stand corrected. It's been reported that the UK is laying claim to vast tracts of Antarctica and surrounds, in order to secure oil and mineral rights - resources that in the 21st century will become increasingly required to sustain industrial expansion. So many things are wrong with this action, I won't even begin to argue a coherent case against the land grab. But I will say this - when will coherent, calm and capable people begin to argue the case against national interest? Almost every evil on the world stage, and every good that is halted or hindered, is related to an act made in some nation's "national interest". And yet, we are all victims of bleeding across porous borders. I am concerned that the late century ahead will feature increasingly bizarre alliances and struggles over far-flung bits of land and undersea beds to establish dominance over other economies. Oh, so like the last few centuries, then. How this ties in to Labour's ethical and green agendas, heaven only knows.

A Reading at Exeter College

I read Sunday with Elaine Feinstein at Exeter College, Oxford, as part of the Life Lines 2: Poets for Oxfam launch readings to a good-sized audience of appreciative and thoughtful students. During the Q & A questions regarding translation, evil and truth in poetry, and other matters, arose. One audience member rather kindly compared the sounds in my poems to Heaney and Plath. We then attended Choral Evensong (there was also Holy Baptism of two young people), followed by dinner at High Table, as a guest of the Rector. It was a very fine day, altogether, made better by the extraordinary sunlight.

One Way Of Looking At It...

Sean O'Brien, in today's Guardian, writes of the affliction of poetry - not, in his way of thinking, a career at all - but rather, a bit of a damned-if-you-do, damned-if-you-don't kind of thing: one either writes poetry or goes mad, or writes poetry and goes mad, as he memorably, and dramatically, suggests.

I find much of this article convincing, and thoughtful, and useful reading, especially for non-poets, who often don't consider the immense and usually near-useless sacrifice that most poets make of their lives (as O'Brien reminds us Eliot had noted); for every two or three poets in each generation that continue to be read 50-100 years later (name three poets of the 1890s who are really read widely now, other than Yeats, Wilde and Swinburne; okay, now name ten; now name twenty.... now make a list of the 100-200 poets writing now...) the hundreds who also spent their lives on poetry (and it is a spending) are mainly lost to indifference, or studied, if at all, from a purely academic perspective. Most poetry is good, not just good enough, and few poets know, while alive, whether their work will last.

So, O'Brien is reminding the doctors, the lawyers, the civil servants, that, while they may have the villas and the jaguars, they also have the certainty that their careers are defined by a limited but sane purpose; poets have no such safe basis on which to plan or build. This way can lead to "madness" - is madness, arguably, from the get go.

What I should like to add is, that, while the verbal drama of invoking the poet as chief genius of madness (as the Greeks and romantics both believed, as John Berryman knew, and Plath and Lowell and he and Delmore and others not so long ago proved), is both vaguely satisfying to poets (it is one thing to be mainly ignored and potentially useless, it is another to be so but know oneself to be at least part of the agonistic drama that is creation) and even perhaps attractive to non-poets, it is only part of the story.

As I have argued on these posts and pages before, poetry is a recognised isolating, difficult, path (I do call it a career but mean by that simply it has its professional, life-long elements - poetry is a vocation and a career, as the priesthood or teaching, two other Calvaryesque callings) - but it need not be so painful as it often is. If poetry leads to madness, then what can poets do to make it less terrible? Surely, all people who live face the same terrible end - death. The key is to secure a viable way to live, a philosophy, that allows for some consolation, even sanity, in the face of the terror that is our one-way ticket out of here.

Thus, I feel poets should reflect more on their duty to other poets. This is not the same as their duty to poetry, which may be as individual, rigorous and austere as any forty days in the wilderness if they wish - but it is a complementary duty. Poets are too often antagonistic to their fellow practitioners, seeing them (incorrectly) as rivals for laurels. Instead, our fellow poets form a community of the similarly-afflicted. They are our comrades - no other word will do - on the arduous long march to - what? - an unsure, unknown victory, or defeat. Mad we may be, but we needn't be alone in the madhouse. Poets should, as the actors did in Hollywood, form a more solid union, to support each other in times of need. Those times are never far away.

Poem by David Caddy

Eyewear is glad to welcome David Caddy (pictured) this week. He lives and writes in rural Dorset. Founder of the East Street Poets in 1985, Caddy was director of the well-known Wessex Poetry Festival from 1995-2001. He is the editor of the literary journal Tears in the Fence, which publishes good poetry from around the world, and is open to a variety of poetic viewpoints. I recommend it as a place to send work, and also a place to find work.

Caddy presents the monthly Internet radio programme, So Here We Are: Poetic Letters From England. His latest books are London: City of Words, a literary companion from BlueIsland (2006) and The Willy Poems (Clamp Down Press 2004). He regularly reviews for the Use of English magazine and Terrible Work online magazine. His next book, Man In Black, is out from Penned In The Margins this November. I look forward to reading it.

Shuffling The Icons Shaking The Trees


1
Black is this year’s white and light born
yonder to appear as beyond nature,
the head shakes to see the make-over
the old marks, the winkling out and infill.

Willow and alder wild-eyed from neglect
by watery sensations and psychic home
with preLatinate logic in our clothes
in this parade of nettles and overkill.

Sticky with sap, smell of quince,
bloodsucker head spouts, daintiness flies
into an inferno of electrical dependency.
Dim groups disassemble looking for eyes to see.


2
Oak is ancient book and index.
Spin and governance barely show
such splits and coves and touts
that crackle with stunts and fire.

A world to go out into to become
without and within hearing
without mediating the immediate
holding it all inside.

Curiously hidden behind shadow
strident tightly wrought words
replete with intent to awake
into recognition and mission.


3
Shuffling the Tarot, they hold,
fold, entice with letter and face
knowing that escape is no escape
not this day not this time.

The operation’s a gentle gnawing
on the chain, a bone licking tendency
to follow a prescribed order
and gain some respite from movement.

When young he copies out
his Donne from memory, muttering
in private disputation, wonder
of the addressee, boldness of argument.


4
On Sundays we visit the church of poetry
not through habit, through pressure, want.
New neighbours block off martins nests
and gunmen range to hunt in rovers.

About a doing, a making and a making do.
Bring up from the dark those amputated
those dormant, smoking fields and scrags.
Bring up from the dark those nameless people.

I am speaking of a ghost of a form
of expectation, the thought of thought
that drives legs and arms and eyes
to respect and ask for a journalist.


5
Those that know the ruin of empire
the moral core stretched to recoil,
farm handouts on nil return
slope management shot through.

Slept, crept, kept, wept, under attack.
Water supplies dip to unholy holiness
map, plaque, flak, crack.
Sometimes the threat is real.

Silence and binary logic wails
with disinformation, innocence.
The near homeless squint and mumble,
admissible as flint and lock.


6
With enough tension to fuse and decompose
to partially revitalise the chemically blown
from Farnham, effectively repopulated,
to Stickland, well-heeled and footloose

to the old-fashioned old cold table top
wood bare for lurch of calcium
Davy’s kindling deoxidised, sway of sulphur,
isolate of vitamin D, crazy, genuine.

More rackets to drug the market focus
the ostensible tap, tap of Tesco,
plight of village poorly sourced
craving to decode silence, bussed to charity.


7
The ear takes soundings beyond
masters of grammar and taxonomies
each scented petal has a name
that I bestow and cultivate around you.

Each balm and bane between us
lies to afford a presentation, a show,
a moment that is ours alone
thirsting to find new home.

Matter comes alight out of measure
our immortality’s a space and shadow
a quiet shuddering on earth’s face
the light is of light, I know.


8
Coda: Lady Jane Davy


Jane was as much under uterine dominion
to compose, recompose fluoric acid gas
as is graceful and pleasing
whether oxygenated, intoxicated or berated.

The first ever to fall victim to algebra
ascertain with greater precision
the nature of acidity in relations
and be geometrically led from virtue.

That combination of associate ignition
not yet a breach but a positive expansion
lit fuse after fuse far beyond
the string and glue of bound leaves.

poem by David Caddy