Thursday 28 August 2008

Happy Birthday, Sir John!

Poet-in-Residence cannot let this day, the late John Betjeman's 102nd birthday, pass without marking the occasion. In England the late poet laureate, critic, historian, conservationist, short-story writer, railway enthusiast, country lover and humorist is something of a national institution despite his friendly bombs falling on Slough.
In the following poem Myfanwy (a Welsh girl's name) the old smoothie has a crush on the nanny; yearns to get her in the pottingshed it would appear!

Myfanwy

Kind o'er the kinderbank leans my Myfanwy,
White o'er the play-pen the sheen of her dress,
Fresh from the bathroom and soft in the nursery
Soap-scented fingers I long to caress.

Were you a prefect and head of your dormit'ry?
Were you a hockey girl, tennis or gym?
Who was your favourite? Who had a crush on you?
Which were the baths where they taught you to swim?

Smooth down the Avenue glitters the bicycle,
Black-stockinged legs under navy-blue serge,
Home and Colonial, Star, International,
Balancing bicycle leant on the verge.

Trace me your wheel-tracks, you fortunate bicycle,
Out of the shopping and into the dark,
Back down the Avenue, back to the pottingshed,
Back to the house on the fringe of the park.

Golden the light on the locks of Myfanwy,
Golden the light on the book on her knee,
Finger-marked pages of Rackham's Hans Andersen,
Time for the children to come down to tea.

Oh! Fuller's angel-cake, Robertson's marmalade,
Liberty lampshade, come, shine on us all,
My! what a spread for the friends of Myfanwy
Some in the alcove and some in the hall.

Then what sardines in the half-lighted passages!
Locking of fingers in long hide-and-seek.
You will protect me, my silken Myfanwy,
Ringleader, tom-boy, and chum to the weak.

- Sir John Betjeman (1906-84)

Tuesday 26 August 2008

Zen Speug and The Throu-Gaun Chiel

Zen Speug is John McDonald's haiku website. A mouse-click on Zen Speug in P-i-R's alphabetical sidebar will take you to John McDonald, Edinburgh's haiku answer to Robert Burns, quicker than you can down a scotch on the rocks.

The Throu-Gaun Chiel (pub: Cyberwit.net) is John McDonald's new book of haiku verse. The intriguing title is the author's translation into Scots, one of the three languages of Scotland, of Jack Kerouac's phrase 'Le Passant' - he who passes through. The 99 haiku presented in this slim volume are written in Scots and English just like the author's cool green internet pages.

The collection begins with a suitable image:

craw:
i the howe o'r derk fedders
a green egg

crow:
deep in her dark feathers
a green egg

We may wonder about this dark crow and this green egg. Is it perhaps a metaphor for the Zen Speug site? Is the crow the author himself?

What other secrets does this crow hold concealed in those dark feathers: Will the egg hatch? What will come out of this egg? Another crow? A meal? And why a crow? Hints of the poet Ted Hughes, not far away in Yorkshire, and his infamous Crow - a villain and a bringer of bad tidings. There's much to digest here. But we must move on:

the cailleach
an the burn
...at their ain slaw raik

the old lady
and the stream
...at their own slow pace

It pays to go slowly through this collection. One or two verses a day will provide plenty of food for thought. Who is the old cailleach? What is she doing by the slow moving stream? When a burn slows it means the bed is wide. Is the old lady lonely, perhaps a widow. Could she be dreaming of her departed husband? Perhaps the stream enters a deep river? Will the old lady turn and retrace her steps. Or go on? Maybe she's only going to feed the ducks.

A John McDonald haiku often provides scope for wordplay; and here we can substitute Scots words like burn for stream and cailleach for old woman in the English version to good effect. This possibility enhances the whole experience; brings greater depth and/or more poetry to the haiku.

Consider the following. In Poet-in-Residence's book John McDonald reaches haiku perfection here.

anither yirdin -
sin blinters on the spaiks
o a birlin trinnle

another funeral -
sun glitters on the spokes
of a turning wheel

There is no need for comment here; but it is a fact that an extra quality of this haiku is the subliminal image of iron railings, perhaps of a graveyard, suggested by the sound of the Scots word spaiks, the word for the spokes of a wheel.

Here's a prize-winning haiku from The Throu-Gaun Chiel:

a skein o geese -
het
on the howe's haunle

a skein of geese -
warmth
on the hoe's handle

Terrific imagery here. The author gives so much in these three small lines. Note the strength of that single punctuation mark for instance. Such attention to detail is another of John McDonald's hallmarks. Nothing is rushed. All is carefully thought through.

It's commonly said that dog owners, as a breed, often resemble their pets. But what about that fishmonger in the High Street? Before closing this wonderful book, some food for thought:

in the winnock
the fushmunger -
his fite-shark's fin cowe

in the window
the fishmonger -
his white-shark's fin haircut

Visit Zen Speug and make friends with John if you haven't already done so.

The publicity photo, taken by son Euan and featured on the book's cover shows a cheery Scot and a grinning frog. And not a bottle of scotch in sight! Cheers John and well done!

- Gwilym Williams

Saturday 23 August 2008

R K Singh's Sexless Solitude and Other Poems

There's a lot of R K Singh in his forthcoming book Sexless Solitude and Other Poems. Poet-in-Residence readers will be familiar with the exotic, spiritual, sexual and darkly threatening unsettling qualities of Singh's work.

Most of the poems in Sexless Solitude and Other Poems are vignettes of a dozen or so lines, as you'd expect from this poet, but their short length is very often their strength. In their brevity lies their force. You cannot read more than a few lines of R K Singh before you start squirming in your seat wondering when the next punch to your solar plexus, or even lower down, is going to come.

Singh writes about many things; often of what he sees on a day to day basis in the streets of an Indian city. Sometimes he comes across as a lone voice crying in the wilderness. Frustration with life, existence, meaning, dirt, smell, sex, God, and consequently the driving need to explore these themes is never far away.

Barbed Wire Fence begins with typical Singh bluntness - a kind of warts and all poetry to put you through the wringer; gone is any hope of salvation - no description of pleasant fauna and flora, as with D H Lawrence, to help the poetic medicine go down -

My window opens
to the back of a garage
where guards make water

Don't Condemn Me opens the collection. It's nothing if not straight to the point -

It's all linked but I don't understand
or don't want to understand because
I am too much with me and worry
about her dying libido and my
own shrinking sex . . .

Where R K Singh scores high for me is when he looks at the world and the ugly things in it, which he often does. I enjoyed, if enjoyed is the right word, the metaphorical poem Dying Light, a reflection of our times, which begins -

Spiders' network
gleaming with corpses
that have no face

What's really behind R K Singh's unceasing output of verse? is a question I have asked myself more than once. Why does he strive so long and hard? Is there here an eternal search for some universal truth? Or is it simply anger at the way the world, and India, is?

On the other hand I sometimes feel like an intruder, one who forgot to knock at the door, a stranger witness to an act of poetic masturbation. An ejaculation of poetry is certainly taking place -

I secrete poetry like semen

Singh informs the reader in the poem I'm Different

and different he certainly is. But it's a refreshingly honest no-holds-barred difference.

By exploring the work of R K Singh we may not only come to understand something of the world of this unique poet but may also come to discover more secrets about ourselves and the world in which live and have our being.

The title poem Sexless Solitude brings the reader to a wonderful image.

. . .

she dwells on moonbeams

I can see her smiling
with wind-chiselled breast
in sexless solitude

. . .

It's been a pleasure to share your world R K.


- Gwilym Williams

On Venice Lido with Ink-Sweat-and-Tears

A Poet-in-Residence poem On Venice Lido is currently on the front page of Charles Christian's popular Ink-Sweat-and-Tears website.
It's a street poetry poem and as such will appeal to readers familiar with Thomas Mann's atmospheric novelette Tod in Venedig (Death in Venice) and/or the classic Luchino Visconti film of the same name.
Along with the poem there's an unashamed plug for Gwilym Williams' Genteel Messages collection (from which the poem On Venice Lido comes).
Handy links to the ink-sweat-and-tears website and the poetrymonthly.com bookshop can be found in the alphabetical sidebar at left.

Friday 22 August 2008

Who will be the Queen's canary?

In 2009 a new poet laureate will be chosen to replace the founder of the Poetry Archive (see sidebar link) Andrew Motion. Poet-in-Residence, a 1,000/1 outside shot (or whatever the maximum odds are at the bookies) for the post, speaks here only of the UK poet laureate. Do not confuse with the challenging and interesting USA version where Kay Ryan is currently the poet in the chair.
In the early 1940s, in other words during the 2nd World War, Dylan Thomas saw through all the bardic chicanery and got together with John Davenport to write alternate chapters in a spoof poet laureate crime mystery titled The Death of the King's Canary (Hutchinson). George VI was then (1936-52) on the throne following the abdication of Edward VII.
As Constantine Fitzgibbon points out in her introduction to the book, published in 1976, the book was in the 1940s unpublishable because many of the main characters were still alive.
Prime Minister Gordon Brown will soon have the duty of selecting the next poet laureate and Poet-in-Residence hopes that his choice will be one that can raise the slumbering profile of UK Poetry.
It would appear that Dylan Thomas himself wrote the introductory paragraphs of The Death of the King's Canary since it was an original idea burning in Dylan's brain from 1938 and anyway they carry Dylan's humorous twice-licked stamp. Here then, something from the introductory paragraphs.

His nerves had not been soothed by the bishop's unctuous platitudes. An unsettling evening. First, the bomb in the shrubbery - no loss of life, but such a noise; then dinner, and he had looked forward to dinner - every bottle of the Chambertin 1911 hopelessly grey-haired. Then the bishop. Thank God he'd gone to bed at last, taking their memories with him. It was only when the bishop came that the Prime Minister realized how dull his life had been.
The door behind him opened. What were they going to do to him now? It was his private secretary. The Prime Minister looked relieved: he knew that he had nothing to fear. Peace reigned temporarily on earth and peace would reign at Chequers.
'Thought you'd gone to bed.'
'Just on my way, sir. I've brought you the poets.'
What midnight delegation of poets had tracked him here?
'The poets?'
'For the Laureatship, sir. You said you'd decide this weekendend. I've made a few notes about their background and so on.'
'Have I got to read them, Faraday?'
'Afraid so, sir.'
'Well, leave them on the table. Goodnight.'
'Goodnight, sir.'
His condor's head caught the lamplight as he left the library. A profound self-compassion filled the Prime Minister. He rang the bell; and crossing the room, chose a cigar.
'You rang, sir?'
He hated the butler's great slab of a face.
'A bottle of Napoleon brandy, Bibby.'
'Very good, sir.'
The cigar was drawing well. He crossed to the window and listened conscientiously to the nightingales until the brandy came.
'You needn't wait up, Jackson.'
'Thank you, sir. Goodnight, sir.'
'Goodnight.'
The butler, whose name was Philpot, closed the door behind him . . .

. . .

His eye fell on the pile of brightly wrappered poets, and he sighed. Ah well, perhaps it might not be such a ghastly task after all: he did not read much English poetry later than Pope, although he admired Tennyson's ear. These people might be interesting.
On top of the books lay a page of Faraday's neat script.
'Albert Ponting, born Balham 1910. Ed. privately. Did Chemistry course at Polytechnic. Must read, but suggest unsuitable.'
The Prime Minister picked up a volume called Claustrophosexannal. The title was puzzling. He opened the book and began to read.

Wednesday 20 August 2008

Genteel Messages most favourably reviewed!

Before rushing to order your copy of Genteel Messages (by Poet-in-Residence Gwilym Williams) please visit the 'The Recusant' (link in sidebar) and read the first and only available review of the collection. You will then know that you're in for a poetic treat and that you're not wasting your time or your money.

Many thanks to Alan Morrison at 'The Recusant' for his excellent and perceptive review.

Monday 18 August 2008

Wergle Flomp Winners Announced!

Benjamin Taylor Lally, creative writing teacher and poet of Burlington, MA, is the winner of the 7th Wergle Flomp. His poem First Edition, 2008 pokes fun at America's poetic standard bearer Walt Whitman and was entered in a so-called vanity contest (to qualify for free entry into the Wergle Flomp contest). Lally's spoof poem contains such memorable Whitmanesque lines as:

O, I also enjoy singing about America
When I am in the shower

. . .

I am a singing butcher and a tire maker and a quality inspector
And a street vendor and an RA,
but not the lame kind that yells at you
and takes all of your beer

. . .

One time I saw a bunch of naked guys bathing under a waterfall like Niagra
my pants began expanding, like I'd taken Viagra
I stood behind a window and couldn't look away

c) - 2008 B T Lally / with a little help from Walt Whitman

The runner-up in the 7th Wergle Flomp was Julie Porter of Montclair, NJ, with The Rape of the Cock... an ode to Lorena Bobbitt of penis amputation fame. In 3rd place was India's Sooja Jones. Twelve other honourable mentions shared 4th spot. There were over 800 entries from around the world and 15 prizes were awarded, ranging from $1,359 to $72.95 - as usual Poet-in-Residence provides a handy link to the site in the P-i-R sidebar. Much fun to explore and consistently voted a Top 101 poetry site!

And the fate of Poet in Residence's own Wergle Flomp entry? Seriously puzzling - a bronze medal prize received from the vanity poetry site!!!