June 18, 2004 - 10:40 p.m.

http://www.brainysmurf.org/archives/001118.html
Hooray for the Michael Moore backlash.  I am suspicious of
universal adulation/ hatred.  

I do not like the fawning liberal glitterati:
Moby,'Lauren Bacall'(whoever she is, she's annoying), 
Tony Bennett(!:'i think michael moore is a great guy, 
everying he says is honest, and is just the reality of 
things' - no Tony! that's blind adulation- bad Tony! bad!).

http://news.bbc.co.uk/broadband/news_console.stm
"entertainment"=>"could moore's film unseat bush?"

Salman Rushdie kicks ass though: 'it made its points in 
a..very forceful and emotional way.. clearly i share a number 
of the conclusions that he comes to.

Yes, me too Salman.  Kerry is preferable to bush, but moore's
emotional raving is dissapointing.

               ..  ....
Italy midfielder Gennaro Gattuso is suspended 
for the game against Bulgaria but said: "I 
would like to see 50 television cameras at 
that game (Sweden v Denmark)."

"Instead of watching us, everybody should go 
and keep an eye on what happens there.

"I'm sick of being lectured. We are Italy and 
we have a tradition. Let's look in their houses."

Italy's Alessandro Del Piero added: "It would 
be a dirty result if it were to finish 2-2 
and we were knocked out.

"But I think a 2-2 draw would be a difficult 
result to arrange, and if it happened it 
would be a terrible blight on both countries." 


I hope Italy go out.  If its as a result of loosing to
Bulgaria, even better.

Buy any of these and you will be glad
(Books I recently read)
..       .    ..............     ..     .    .
Origin of "The Lake Isle of Innisfree"
by W. B. Yeats, from his Autobiography

Return to Thoreau Reader - Poetry

I had [in London] various women friends on whom I would call 
towards five o'clock mainly to discuss my thoughts that I 
could not bring to a man without meeting some competing 
thought, but partly because their tea and toast saved my 
pennies for the bus ride home; but with women, apart from 
their intimate exchanges of thought, I was timid and abashed. 
I was sitting on a seat in front of the British Museum 
feeding pigeons when a couple of girls sat near and began 
enticing my pigeons away, laughing and whispering to one 
another, and I looked straight in front of me, very 
indignant, and presently went into the Museum without turning 
my head towards them. Since then I have often wondered if 
they were pretty or merely very young. Sometimes I told 
myself very adventurous love-stories with myself for hero, 
and at other times I planned out a life of lonely austerity, 
and at other times mixed the ideals and planned a life of 
lonely austerity mitigated by periodical lapses. I had still 
the ambition, formed in Sligo in my teens, of living in 
imitation of Thoreau on Innisfree, a little island in Lough 
Gill (photo 62k), and when walking through Fleet Street very 
homesick I heard a little tinkle of water and saw a fountain 
in a shop-window which balanced a little ball upon its jet, 
and began to remember lake water. From the sudden remembrance 
came my poem "Innisfree," my first lyric with anything in its 
rhythm of my own music. I had begun to loosen rhythm as an 
escape from rhetoric and from that emotion of the crowd that 
rhetoric brings, but I only understood vaguely and 
occasionally that I must for my special purpose use nothing 
but the common syntax. A couple of years later I could not 
have written that first line with its conventional archaism 
-- "Arise and go" -- nor the inversion of the last stanza. 

                      ----------
The Lake Isle of Innisfree

I will arise and go now, and go to Innisfree,
And a small cabin build there, of clay and wattles made;
Nine bean rows will I have there, a hive for the honey bee,
And live alone in the bee-loud glade.

And I shall have some peace there, for peace comes dropping slow,
Dropping from the veils of the morning to where the cricket sings;
There midnight's all aglimmer, and noon a purple glow,
And evening full of the linnet's wings.

I will arise and go now, for always night and day
I hear lake water lapping with low sounds by the shore;
While I stand on the roadway, or on the pavements grey,
I hear it in the deep heart's core.

---------------                 -         -           -
Crow - Ted Hughes http://ftp.ccccd.edu/andrade/britlit/hughes/poetryh.html
                         Littleblood

                         O littleblood, hiding from the mountains in the mountains
                         Wounded by stars and leaking shadow
                         Eating the medicinal earth.


                         O littleblood, little boneless little skinless
                         Ploughing with a linnet's carcase
                         Reaping the wind and threshing the stones.

                         O littleblood, drumming in a cow's skull
                         Dancing with a gnat's feet
                         With an elephant's nose with a crocodile's tail.

                         Grown so wise grown so terrible
                         Sucking death's mouldy tits.

                         Sit on my finger, sing in my ear, O littleblood.

Beowulf - tr. Seamus Heaney
(read it lent it, now im worried about loosing it.)

Tales from Ovid's Metamorphoses - tr. Ted Hughes
(Jupiter rapes nymphs.  melancholy vengeance obsession violence.
midas narcissus pyramus+thisbe(romeo+juliet))

Hamlet - Shakespeare
("to be or not to be""alas, poor Yoric""take thee to a 
nunnery!")

Les Fleurs du Mal - Baudelaire
(opium,pestilance,whores,liquor,dirty paris,satan)

Don Quixote - Miguel de Cervantes, tr. Edith Grossman
(mocking pop.lit of the time (1605, contempory of 
Shakespeare!).  Quixote goes mad after reading too many tales 
of knightly valour)

The Rattle Bag - eds. Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes
(poetry bits and bobs and gems at random)

The School Bag - eds. Seamus Heaney, Ted Hughes
(comprehensive anthology of poetry in English. clever juxtaposition of poems)

Selected Poems 1923-1958 - E.E. Cummings
(half the book is good.  women and men (both dong and ding)
                         summer autumn winter spring
                         reaped their sowing and went their came
                         sun moon stars rain
                               ---          --
                         i sing of Olaf glad and big
                         whose warmest heart recoiled at war:
                         a conscientious object-or
                      ------- -- 
                         a man who had fallen among theves
                         lay by the roadside on his back
                         dressed in fifteenthrate ideas
                         wearing a round jeer for a hat
                            -      ----------           
                         Buffalo Bill's
                         defunct
                                who used to
                                ride a watersmooth-silver
                                                         stallion
                         and break onetwothreefourfive pigeonsjustlikethat
                                                                          Jesus
                         he was a handsome man
                                              and what i want to know is
                         how do you like your blueeyed boy
                         Mister Death)

Traditional Chinese Poetry and Poetics - Stephen Owen
(quirky organisation.  a collection of thoughts, but very 
learned.  some of it reads like a platonic dialoge!  Owen 
seems like a nutter and i like him.)

  take the plunge?
      haha ah   AHA aha ahAHAHAHAAAAAAa gagagaaagegeg

Elizabeth Bishop - At The Fishhouses
Adrienne Rich - Diving into the Wreck

I just read these two poems and read this comparison.
It was good.
Now its easy for you to if you have time.

http://www.english.uiuc.edu/maps/poets/a_f/bishop/gilbert.htm
Rich's is nice, maybe a bit blatant.  Elizabeth Bishop's poem
is one of the best i have ever read.good.


Elizabeth Bishop - At The Fishhouses

Although it is a cold evening,
down by one of the fishhouses
an old man sits netting,
his net, in the gloaming almost invisible,
a dark purple-brown,
and his shuttle worn and polished.
The air smells so strong of codfish
it makes one's nose run and one's eyes water.
The five fishhouses have steeply peaked roofs
and narrow, cleated gangplanks slant up
to storerooms in the gables
for the wheelbarrows to be pushed up and down on.
All is silver: the heavy surface of the sea,
swelling slowly as if considering spilling over,
is opaque, but the silver of the benches, 
the lobster pots, and masts, scattered

among the wild jagged rocks,
is of an apparent translucence
like the small old buildings with an emerald moss
growing on their shoreward walls.
The big fish tubs are completely lined 
with layers of beautiful herring scales
and the wheelbarrows are similarly plastered 
with creamy iridescent coats of mail,
with small iridescent flies crawling on them.
Up on the little slope behind the houses,
set in the sparse bright sprinkle of grass,
is an ancient wooden capstan,
cracked, with two long bleached handles
and some melancholy stains, like dried blood,
where the ironwork has rusted.
The old man accepts a Lucky Strike.
He was a friend of my grandfather.
We talk of the decline in the population
and of codfish and herring
while he waits for a herring boat to come in.
There are sequins on his vest and on his thumb.
He has scraped the scales, the principal beauty,
from unnumbered fish with that black old knife,
the blade of which is almost worn away.

Down at the water's edge, at the place
where they haul up the boats, up the long ramp
descending into the water, thin silver
tree trunks are laid horizontally
across the gray stones, down and down 
at intervals of four or five feet.

Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
element bearable to no mortal,
to fish and to seals . . . One seal particularly
I have seen here evening after evening.
He was curious about me.  He was interested in music;

like me a believer in total immersion,
so I used to sing him Baptist hymns.
I also sang "A Mighty Fortress Is Our God."
He stood up in the water and regarded me 
steadily, moving his head a little.
Then he would disappear, then suddenly emerge
almost in the same spot, with a sort of shrug
as if it were against his better judgment.
Cold dark deep and absolutely clear,
the clear gray icy water . . . Back, behind us,
the dignified tall firs begin.
Bluish, associating with their shadows,
a million Christmas trees stand
waiting for Christmas.  The water seems suspended
above the rounded gray and blue-gray stones.
I have seen it over and over, the same sea, the same,
slightly, indifferently swinging above the stones,
icily free above the stones,
above the stones and then the world.
If you should dip your hand in,
your wrist would ache immediately,
your bones would begin to ache and your hand would burn
as if the water were a transmutation of fire
that feeds on stones and burns with a dark gray flame.
If you tasted it, it would first taste bitter,
then briny, then surely burn your tongue.
It is like what we imagine knowledge to be: 
dark, salt, clear, moving, utterly free,
drawn from the cold hard mouth
of the world, derived from the rocky breasts
forever, flowing and drawn, and since
our knowledge is historical, flowing, and flown.








Adrienne Rich - Diving into the Wreck

First having read the book of myths,
and loaded the camera,
and checked the edge of the knife-blade,
I put on
the body-armor of black rubber
the absurd flippers
the grave and awkward mask.
I am having to do this
not like Cousteau with his
assiduous team
aboard the sun-flooded schooner
but here alone.

There is a ladder.
The ladder is always there
hanging innocently
close to the side of the schooner.
We know what it is for,
we who have used it.
Otherwise
it is a piece of maritime floss
some sundry equipment.

I go down.
Rung after rung and still
the oxygen immerses me
the blue light
the clear atoms
of our human air.
I go down.
My flippers cripple me,
I crawl like an insect down the ladder
and there is no one
to tell me when the ocean
will begin.

First the air is blue and then
it is bluer and then green and then
black I am blacking out and yet
my mask is powerful
it pumps my blood with power
the sea is another story
the sea is not a question of power
I have to learn alone
to turn my body without force
in the deep element.

And now: it is easy to forget
what I came for
among so many who have always
lived here
swaying their crenellated fans
between the reefs
and besides
you breathe differently down here.

I came to explore the wreck.
The words are purposes.
The words are maps.
I came to see the damage that was done
and the treasures that prevail.
I stroke the beam of my lamp
slowly along the flank
of something more permanent
than fish or weed

the thing I came for:
the wreck and not the story of the wreck
the thing itself and not the myth
the drowned face always staring
toward the sun
the evidence of damage
worn by salt and away into this threadbare beauty
the ribs of the disaster
curving their assertion
among the tentative haunters.

This is the place.
And I am here, the mermaid whose dark hair
streams black, the merman in his armored body.
We circle silently
about the wreck
we dive into the hold.
I am she: I am he

whose drowned face sleeps with open eyes
whose breasts still bear the stress
whose silver, copper, vermeil cargo lies
obscurely inside barrels
half-wedged and left to rot
we are the half-destroyed instruments
that once held to a course
the water-eaten log
the fouled compass

We are, I am, you are
by cowardice or courage
the one who find our way
back to this scene
carrying a knife, a camera
a book of myths
in which
our names do not appear.

 
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