Gustav Doré again, stepping out of time with Coleridge. Note the glittering eye; it really is good. And not unmemorable.
Ah, it’s springtime – the world afresh… At 8.30pm as I write this, it’s only just getting dark, and the weather was downright warm today. I was, however, a bit late for work, so had no time to get out at Green Park and walk down through the parks. At lunchtime I was feeling too stressed out and, frankly, under deadline to go sit in the park with my colleague, so just went down the road to get some food instead, and ate it at my desk. Did I leave dead on 5.30 and walk back up through the parks? (They’re not that nice at the moment anyway: swarming with tourists and completely chewed up with enclosures, scaffolding and plastic walkways in advance of the royal wedding.) No, as you can by now guess, dear reader, I did not. I had not yet finished the utterly vital, deadline-based task I was endeavouring to complete. I managed to slip out at about 6.10, but with some quick catching-up to do first thing in the morning. Then just too tired, and wanted to get home at a reasonable time. The Victoria Line, Sainsbury’s, a spot of light cooking…
The laundry is in, the plants are watered, I’ve commissioned an 11th-hour fiction review for Horizon Review, and am now – as you can see – tending to poor little Baroque Mansions.
My five minutes of reading today, on the way in to work, amounted to one poem from David Kinloch’s new book Finger of a Frenchman. I read the first of “Five Portraits of Mary” (Queen of Scots): “Mary Stuart’s Dream,” the first poem in the book.
From what I can make out, the book is an exploration of Scottishness (which indeed has ties to Frenchness, as the figure of Mary, who was also Queen of France, illustrates; basically, think “opposite of English”), with a time dimension in it. The poems are largely if not all historical, and written in sympathetically period diction.
This project is interesting to yours truly. It wasn’t till I was putting the manuscript together for Egg Printing Explained – no, not till I was having to describe it to people for one reason and another – that I realised how much in the past it is, and in other kinds of voices. And the question is, how do you do that? Do you go pastiche, ham, do you just go native, is it a question of contemporary-formal with a few olde wordes thrown in? Clearly the pirate in my Pirate Prufrock poem was easy. I was just trying to be as piratey as possible. There’s one where the voice appears to be of a queen, who appears to be unmarried and used to people being beheaded; I just did that one straight, really.
Here is Kinloch’s Mary:
When I sit late at works, almost
within the verdure of this tower’s
only tapestry – rabbits in an orange tree
by my shoulder – an old globe
chases silly latitudes beneath
the casement window and looking out,
the scant, dank countryside makes up
fields of Poitou mist. Distantly at first,
– but the globe birls it closer – a giant
oak shaped like a country crests
towards my berth. A man wreathed
in raindrops disembarks. Do the King’s
swans flee him? Is that cry a peacock
at midday? I hear his feet discreetly
pad the pockmarked steps and now
he is before me. Alone. With his box
of little instruments. He is a humble man
and the Scots leid on his lips is just
the burr that made my cradle sleepy.
Together we compare our cabinet of works…
This voice seems to coalesce relatively slowly; I was thrown off a bit by the poety “birls, but of course the word has a purpose in “burr;” and the countryside cresting towards her berth is a wonderful image. I particularly admire the slightly off-kilter syntax or punctuation of line 5; and this bit – I hear his feet discreetly/ pad the pockmarked steps and now/ he is before me. Alone. With his box/ of little instruments. He is a humble man” reminds me of something, but I can’t think what. It’s gorgeously paced, though.
I’m looking forward to reading the rest, with luck in increments of more than five minutes.
I lie, anyway: I had more minutes of reading, on the way home, and was looking at Mary Oliver’s A Poetry Handbook. Regular readers will know that Mary Oliver is not my favourite poet, and indeed there is some material in the chapter on metrics and more in the chapter on “being free” that got on my nerves.
Speaking of which, it got on my nerves just like an article in the Guardian about someone who sounds like the brother of Jonathan Safran Foer, who has written a book on mnemonics, and was using convoluted visualisations of golf balls with beards growing out of their thighs etc, to train someone else to remember the beginning of The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:
“The whole art of this sport,” explains Foer, wrapping the word sport in qualifying air quotes,* “is in transforming information that’s unmemorable into imagery that’s so weird and raunchy and smelly and emotionally resonant that you can’t forget it.”
I ask you. The Rime of the Ancient Mariner “unmemorable”! Now I know that Michael Donaghy was of course a huge fan of the Renaissance Memory Palace, which Foer is using as his model. But Michael would also never have stood for this idiotic idea that The Rime of the Ancient Mariner – of all poems – needs to be made more memorable by imposing surreal and silly cartoon imagery on it! Oh, for Gods sake, these people, well never mind, let’s move on and stay happy.
So the thing that Mary Oliver said, and it strikes me that this chimes with the Ancient Mariner issue too, is this: “Time – a few centuries here or there – means very little in the world of poems.”**
This really resonates with me. And it is why anyone who wants to should be able to remember:
There is an Ancient Mariniere,
And he stoppeth one of three.
“By thy long grey hair and glitttering eye,
Now wherefore stoppest me?The bridegroom’s doors are opened wide,
and I am next of kin;
the guests are met, the feast is set –
may’st hear the merry din.”He holds him with his skinny hand:
“There was a ship,” quoth he…
Boom! And you’re in. (This poem by the way is also historical; it’s full of archaic-in-his-day spellings and vocabulary; Coleridge was writing a dream of the past… See, even in his day everyone thought their own life was more prosaic than the previous generations… Seems we need that time magic.)
The big triumph of my day – okay, maybe just a small one – was booking off a series of odd days of annual leave – especially if my contract isn’t going to be renewed, I need to take them. (But we don’t know yet.) So I’ve got a whole series of long weekends coming up, even to the extent of having tacked two extra days onto the second four-day weekend, so I’ve got six days off then… (And a two-day week in the middle, a chance to get caught up, maybe?) So with luck that will sort me out for a chance to get out of London for a day maybe, and to prep my ten poetry classes, and to finish Horizon Review (like painting the Forth Bridge), and to write blogs and maybe read a book… Most importantly, it kind of buys me out of the time of my usual days. That particular parceling-out of it. Getting lost in the past feels like a very good idea.
* This in itself is enough to induce a mini-rant.
** There are other things I’ll use from the book, too.
Baroque in Hackney 