The Day We Discovered Pornography in the Mail - Leontia Flynn

Now that I am back, may the posting streak continue...

The Day We Discovered Pornography in the Mail

I once lived in a rented red-brick house
where everyone signed on and slept till noon.

That summer, the city stood like an open door
into a room where something had just ended,
the wine glasses abandoned in the first dawn light.

Because we were so young and so belated,
because we wanted nothing and expected nobody,
the day we discovered pornography in the mail
was a revelation – it seemed a sudden windfall
or a hoopla tossed, with skill, over the rooftops.

We wanted to kneel with gentle reverence
to the envelope, where it lay behind the door
– or to take it up, like a rose, between our teeth.
We wanted to trace that name through the empty streets;
we wanted to cheer him for making a fist of it.

Make Every Line A Corker

I am aware that it has been a while since my last post, and I could not have picked a more auspicious occasion for my return if I had tried. I may be a few months late but the news is nonetheless shocking; Paul Muldoon has written a poem in which he manages to sneak in a reference to the one and only Snooki. Yes indeed, this is a feat which I could not overlook. Readers, look on in horror and awe...

A Bennington Commencement

In June, Paul Muldoon spoke to graduates of the Bennington College Writing Seminars.

In Oxford this “solemnitie” was called an Act
when baccalaureates were mostly bacchanals
and that the humors reigned was held to be a fact

while God and all His creatures were thought to be pals.
W. H. Auden egged on a Harvard crew
when he was called upon to raise morale

at the ’46 Commencement, lighting the fuse
off his cigarette: “Between the chances, choose the odd;
read The New Yorker; trust in God; and take short views.”

Can’t you imagine Auden shuffling his iPod
as he looks out over the End of the World
in search of something like an Oxford quad

on which a banner may yet be unfurled
that reads “Find What You Love” or “Listen To Your Heart”
or “Get Over Yourself”—any such slogan hurled

between the factions where the battle-lines now part
to reveal our noms de plume as noms de guerre?
The challenge is how to kick-start

ourselves and name some grand ambition shining there
at which we may, albeit briefly, set our caps
before throwing those same caps in the capricious air.

One thought that comes to mind is how to mind the gap
between the world that Auden viewed in ’46
and ours. There was a sense back then the map

might be redrawn to take in post-war politics
both literally and metaphorically.
Our sense now is that we’re in such a fix

the wars we fight are best described as pre-,
since we’re not technically “at war” in Afghanistan,
Iraq, or Libya (where our involvement will be

“brief,” our best President assures us as best he can.)
He also told us Guantánamo would be shut
but it’s as Guantanamobama they’ll spray can

his name should Guantánamo linger as a smut
on corn-fed mid-America and our collective soul,
much like the detention centers with their plywood huts

in which the Japanese were left hanging like scrolls
through World War II. Auden would surely be dismayed
by how Arnold no longer means Matthew on the whole

but Schwarzenegger, who claims that when he played
the “sport” of bodybuilding he used steroids
not for muscle growth but muscle “maintenance.” Having weighed

in before now on the deaths of Yeats and Freud,
Auden would surely want to comment on how shame
has rushed in to fill the unavoidable void

left by compulsive hoarders, losers in every game
from weight loss through loss of face on Facebook
to the housewives who give up their embroidery frames

to embroider the truth with a barbed hook.
Where taloned celebrity has broken up with talent
as in the case of Snooki cocking a snook

at Mavis Cheek and Mavis Gallant
and publishing a tell-all disguised as a freakin’ novel
perhaps the time has come not to try to upset the balance

of low and high where hotel morphs to hovel
but find as Shakespeare found, as Aristophanes found,
that the space where the so-called groundlings grovel

is, in fact, a no less consecrated ground
than the king’s seat, the bishop’s throne, the podium
from which commencement speakers get to sound

off on high fructose corn syrup, low sodium,
and the outmoded hierarchy of academic costume.
Before you turn on me with your odium

theologicum and vote me off the island from the powder room
I urge you to follow your hunches
that noms de guerre are indeed noms de plume

and embrace in your writing high colonics, low punches,
a regard for two-bit shaves and haircuts, for getting back late
from three-martini lunches,

a total disdain for the totally disdaining fourth estate
unless it’s to join it as a fifth column,
to be at sixes and sevens in shooting craps or behind the eight

in rooting for both Gilgamesh and Gollum,
in warding off the latest offensive by Google
on copyright (unless it’s held by them). These, then, are my solemn

admonitions for our “solemnitie” (bugle
and drum roll, please): think outside the frame
unless you’re a photographer; be frugal

in everything but praise; never jump a small claim;
always write “some pig” of the least porker
in the barnyard; remember those who fly far look like fair game;

refuse to pay corkage; make every line a corker;
let your main tactic be tact
and—one constant, if I may—read The New Yorker.

Poetry Magazine

I came across this fantastic journal yesterday which according to their website is 'the oldest monthly devoted to verse in the English-speaking world'. Little wonder.
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine

Inside this find were some absolute treasures, among them 'In The High Country' by  David St. John. There are too many wonderful and eminently thievable things in this poem, the kind of things that make you wish you had thought of them first. Sadly, I didnt, but the poem is consolation enough...

In The High Country

Some days I am happy to be no one

The shifting grasses

In the May winds are miraculous enough

As they ripple through the meadow of lupine

The field as iridescent as a Renaissance heaven

& do you see that boy with his arms raised

Like one of Raphael’s angels held within

This hush & this pause & the sky’s lapis expanse?

That boy is my son & I am his only father

Even when I am no one

Another of my own for good measure...

River Bed

If, at night, I should wade into a river,

it is not because I have followed the moon

and the reflections it tricks off the water like flotsam.

Say that I wade in a river at night

that the water might make a pearl of my insides,  

fathoms deep in the swim of the tide.

Say I have gone to the river tonight

to rest my head in the thick of the kelp,

to imagine myself in the melt of the waters,

And if, by day, I have not ferried back,

it is only because I am sunk in the loam

and the eddy’s closed over around me.

Then say I am lost and build me a cairn

out of coral, for this is the place where my body

will rest and the river will flow on above me.

Prayer - Carol Ann Duffy

Some days, although we cannot pray, a prayer
utters itself. So, a woman will lift
her head from the sieve of her hands and stare
at the minims sung by a tree, a sudden gift.

Some nights, although we are faithless, the truth
enters our hearts, that small familiar pain;
then a man will stand stock-still, hearing his youth
in the distant Latin chanting of a train.

Pray for us now. Grade I piano scales
console the lodger looking out across
a Midlands town. Then dusk, and someone calls
a child's name as though they named their loss.

Darkness outside. Inside, the radio's prayer -
Rockall. Malin. Dogger. Finisterre.

Oysters - Seamus Heaney

John Olsen - Study for soft-ground etching 'Seamus Heaney and oysters', 1994

Our shells clacked on the plates.
My tongue was a filling estuary,
My palate hung with starlight:
As I tasted the salty Pleiades
Orion dipped his foot into the water.

Alive and violated,
They lay on their bed of ice:
Bivalves: the split bulb
And philandering sigh of ocean
Millions of them ripped and shucked and scattered.

We had driven to that coast
Through flowers and limestone
And there we were, toasting friendship,
Laying down a perfect memory
In the cool of thatch and crockery.

Over the Alps, packed deep in hay and snow,
The Romans hauled their oysters south of Rome:
I saw damp panniers disgorge
The frond-lipped, brine-stung
Glut of privilege

And was angry that my trust could not repose
In the clear light, like poetry or freedom
Leaning in from sea. I ate the day
Deliberately, that its tang
Might quicken me all into verb, pure verb.

The Mad Cow Talks Back - Jo Shapcott

  

I'm not mad. It just seems that way

because I stagger and get a bit irritable.
There are wonderful holes in my brain
through which ideas from outside can travel
at top speed and through which voices,
sometimes whole people, speak to me
about the universe. Most brains are too
compressed. You need this spongy
generosity to let the others in.

I love the staggers. Suddenly the surface
of the world is ice and I'm a magnificent
skater turning and spinning across whole hard
Pacifics and Atlantics. It's risky when
you're good, so of course the legs go before,
behind, and to the side of the body from time
to time, and then there's the general embarrassing
collapse, but when that happens it's glorious
because it's always when you're travelling
most furiously in your mind. My brain's like
the hive: constant little murmurs from its cells
saying this is the way, this is the way to go.

The Windhover - Gerard Manley Hopkins

A page from G.M.H.'s journal - June 30th 1864

 I caught this morning morning's minion, king-

      dom of daylight's dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding
      Of the rolling level underneath him steady air, and striding
High there, how he rung upon the rein of a wimpling wing
In his ecstasy! then off, off forth on swing,
      As a skate's heel sweeps smooth on a bow-bend: the hurl and gliding
      Rebuffed the big wind. My heart in hiding
Stirred for a bird, – the achieve of, the mastery of the thing. 

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here
      Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion
Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

      No wonder of it: shéer plód makes plough down sillion
Shine, and blue-bleak embers, ah my dear,
      Fall, gall themselves, and gash gold-vermilion.

Fever 103 - Sylvia Plath

Irving Feldman said of Plath that she was 'Glamourous with misery...She looms up as our infirm prophet'. Well Feldman, if this reading is anything to go by then I think you might call me a disciple.

Shale - Vona Groarke

What leaves us trembling in an empty house 
is not the moon, my moon-eyed lover. 
Say instead there was no moon 
though for nine nights we stood 
 
on the brow of the hill at midnight 
and saw nothing that was not 
contained in darkness, in the pier light, 
our hands, and our lost house. 
 
Small wonder that we tired of this 
and chose instead to follow the road 
to the back of the island, and broke 
into the lighthouse-keeper’s house. 
 
We found the lower windows boarded up 
and the doors held fast, but one. 
Inside, we followed the drag of light 
through empty rooms of magenta and sky blue. 
 
This house has been decided by the sea. 
These rooms are stones washed over by waves 
and spray from the lighthouse 
by which we undress 
 
to kneel under the skylight. 
Our hands and lips are smeared with blackberries. 
Your skin, my sloe-skinned lover, 
never so sweet, your hand so quiet. 
 
The sea is breaking and unbreaking on the pier. 
You and I are making love 
in the lighthouse-keeper’s house, 
my moon-eyed, dark-eyed, fire-eyed lover. 
 
What leaves us trembling in an empty room 
is not the swell of darkness in our hands, 
or the necklace of shale I made for you 
that has grown warm between us.

An Opening Post

Manuscript of 'Sailing to Byzantium' W.B. Yeats

It remains to be seen whether my decision to start off this blog with a few of my own poems was a good or bad idea. Either way, 'Keeners', 'Lady of the House', and 'The Lamplighters' have all been sent out into the ether. Be kind and I might just be persuaded to share some more of my work. In the meantime however, I will be posting some of my favourite poetry from all sorts of writers to give you a taste of things to come for Ice on a Hot Stove...

The Lamplighters

They stand, two women, and bookend the rod,

wick and tallow basined between them.

Doily trimmed and apron starched,

they dip the flax, hang to dry and dip again.

The roving fattens with a litany of motions;

white with the fineness of the first skimming,

black grains catch the surface between each sinking:

but still the women anoint the tincted skin,

till, wick-snuffed and socket-fitted, the ritual is over.

Somewhere its flame will glaze a room

and the tallow will gutter and smoke black

as it coils towards the bareness of a low ceiling.

Lady of the House

The list of your small provinces was endless

and lost the run of itself by the end.

Southfleet, Heathfield, Eastbourne,

terrace, bungalow and flat.

The low lands and high lands of homes,

a catalogue of short emigrations.

You were Queen of the glebes,

working the paddocks of kitchens,

and stowing the plots of attic graveyards.

Every place was filled to brim and border,

as with each move you stretched the breadth

of your arms through rooms and spanned the walls.

The furniture of your lawns,

the acres of your window pelmets

and the hectares of your bed linen;

I could always recognise your little country.

A skittering of wild strawberries in one front garden,

a trellis of runner beans at the back of another.

You laid on the floor of your flat once and combed the length

of your fingers through the weave of the carpet.

I would put my head to your chest,

hardly able to tell if you were coming or going,

and let the woollen threads of your vest knit into mine,

let my fingers root in yours.

One night I dreamt a wind entered your home,

slubbing the gloss of surfaces with dust,

and covering with shade rooms lamped in gilt.

It filched through porches,

breached windows lost to drapes,

and tore at your rafters.

By morning it had blown its course;

there was no trace of dust-dance on the lino,

no crockery shaken free from the shelf,

and the dried linen still hung from the clothes horse.

As I watched the day break with the weight of itself 

Only a draught was trying your door.

Keeners

She came weeping at the border-hour,

waiting at the wall between field and house.

In the kitchen, the men strained into the dark

beyond the big window, scared for their lives

and counting quiet decades of prayers

between the kettle and the cooker,

while the women washed away dinner,

singing at the plates in the sink as they tidied.

Outside, she heard their echoes and was moved

past the house whose lights glittered like a shrine.