Category: New/unpublished poems

Lovely and talented Irish poet Eleanor Hooker posted a link on Facebook to linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky delivering a lecture in Dublin. He discusses the fundamental nature of language and what it is designed for. He opened by defining language as ‘sound with meaning’.

Irish clergyman Edward Hincks (born in 1792) was one of the decipherers of Mesopotamian cuneiform (cuneiform script is one of the earliest known systems of writing).

And so, today’s poem.

Decipherment

Language may be
sound with meaning
or meaning with sound
but I’ve been fumbling with wording,
mumbling in ears
for years;
my blunt reed
scores cuneiform script
that no-one can read
on clay tablets
that bake
then break.
I say things I don’t mean,
say mean things,
or mean things, but don’t say them.
You are my Edward Hincks.

It’s strange, what happens, when you don’t know what you’re going to write, but start writing anyway. I was running out of time/ideas/inspiration this afternoon, then the first three lines of this poem came to me.

The biblical image of a camel passing through the eye of a needle has always fascinated me, so I looked here for common phrases that originated from the Bible.

And thus today’s poem came to be.

In the end, there’s no word

I have no sand to stand on:
it’s quick, and disappearing,
like the love in an old lover’s eyes;
like the rebel camel passing
through a needle’s eye;
like the stubborn, now dead, fly
in the ointment of the apothecary;
like the flesh, thorned,
weak despite a willing spirit.

Let my clay feet
run me far away
from the fat of lands,
run me far away
from pigs playing with pearls
to the ends of the salted earth,
return me to ash and dust
at the foot of mountains
moved by faith.

The pinhole camera or camera obscura has been known to scholars since the time of Aristotle and Chinese philosopher Mozi (470 to 390 BCE). Mozi referred to the device as a ‘collecting plate’ or ‘locked treasure room’. (Read more here.)

camera obscura

A vision:
rapidfire mind
clickety click click click click click
remembers ancient secrets
of a locked treasure room,
frames the answer
for public viewing.
Without strain
the honest among us
see truths;
without pride
the kind among us
capture the greatness
of small miracles;
without prejudice
the fair among us
correct distortions
and with each fine grain of good
our divine future tilts
towards a pinhole of light.

Today we lost four days of entries on our (several) websites due to hardware failure of our server. Our in-house techno-guru aka Robert has been working hard all day and evening to nurse the server back to health and recover what we can.

I had to re-enter the last four poems plus my commentary (luckily I had them in Word documents). Sadly, however, it means I’ve lost the many lovely comments that had been posted.

I’m so sorry about that, especially as you took the trouble to not only visit and read the poems, but to write and load those comments (and type the ole anti-spammy-majig).

I hope it won’t put you off commenting on the remaining 20 poems that I will be writing for the month!

Jxo

I read yesterday (over here) that the body of Chilean poet and senator, Pablo Neruda, was exhumed on Monday to establish the exact cause of his death in 1973. He was reported to have died of heart failure when suffering from pancreatic cancer. His driver, however, has long claimed that Neruda was poisoned by the Pinochet regime just two weeks after the coup in Chile during which Neruda’s friend, Salvador Allende, was murdered.

So I wrote a poem, using a selection of approximate poem and book titles from this much-loved Nobel Prize winner.

On exhuming Pablo Neruda

On the blue shore of silence –
calm as if absent –
the briny soil yields broken things:
crushed mud and light,
unquiet stones,
your socks,
salt, tomatoes and wine,
mermaids and drunks,
a carnal apple and a burning hot moon,
a full woman
and a rose, separate,
fleas (that interested you so much),
a book of questions
and songs of despair with the saddest lines,
a lemon absence,
a yellow heart,
a clenched soul in a continent of hope.
A gentleman, alone.

I listened to a ‘Poem Talk’ podcast today of a discussion of Caroline Bergvall’s poem ‘Via: 48 Dante Variations’. The poet collected English translations of the first three lines of Dante’s Inferno from the British Library and arranged them in a certain order.

(The podcast is here.)

So I decided to do a little experiment of my own, which turned into something completely different from what had been discussed in the podcast! I selected a poem called ‘Je suis comme je suis’ from the book Paroles by one of my favourite French poets, Jacques Prévert. The first two lines of the poem are:

Je suis comme je suis
Je suis faite comme ça

I translated them, then worked my way through repeating the two lines – but each time I changed the punctuation and/or order of the words without altering the rhythm of the first two lines. In the first few lines I changed a few words. I retained the same number of lines of the original poem (32) and a stanza break at the same point (after line 12).

The meaning transformed and ended up somewhere quite poignant. Here it is.

just words

I am what I am
I am made that way.
I am who I am
I am made like that.
I am who? I am.
I am. Made. Like that?
I am I am who?
I like that, am made.
Who am I? Are you
like that? I am maid.
Who are you? My eye
likes that maid, I am.

I am who? Are you
who I am? What maid?
You are who my eye
likes, you are made you.
I am. You are. I.
You are. I am. You.
I am. You are. I.
You are. I am. You.
I am. You are. I.
You are. I am. You.
I am. You are. I.
You am I am you
You are why. We made.
You are I, my who.
You are who, and why.
You and I, who are.
You who are my why.
You and I were who?
You who were my who?
Who? You? Me? We? Why?

Earlier this evening we watched an animation about how our complex universe evolved by following a set of defined scientific rules.

That lead me to think about how writers use language and its associated rules to bring complex worlds into being.

And thus poem number six was created. (Maybe I should rest on the seventh day.) I think this one has potential (pardon the pun) to be reworked into a good piece.

how physics and poetry collide

we are creators:
we start, uncertain
with the magic of our ideas
we combine quarky commas
electron verbs
protonic nouns
molecular sentences
craft countless worlds and universes
with their own laws
for inhabitants to understand and follow
for observers to wonder

meanwhile, physicists
take simple rules
to deconstruct our complex expanding universe
from galaxies
to stars
to us
via a periodic table
to a quantum world
where all becomes uncertain:
at Planck’s levels
it’s magic

Today I was reading through contemporary conceptual poet Caroline Bergvall’s ‘Eclat’.

A statement from it hopped into my awareness and swung around the beams there:

‘Where are you not who.’

No question mark.

No punctuation.

So of course I wrote a poem. When re-reading it, I realised that it touched on the idea that there is no trace of an author’s self in conceptual writing – unlike more traditional poetry, where the self of the writer/poet/narrator is apparent.

éclat de conscience

where are you not who:
you might peek around the edge
of a deconstructed sentence
or curl up, contortioned,
in the shelf of an A,
drape yourself languidly
in delirious-sounding prose,
meander through memory-loss
in mis-spelt words,
imitate the yellow blob
that means something
(but not everything)
to someone.
wherever you are
you’ll not discover
who I am
here