What is Poetry?

I’ve seen it recently said on LinkedIn that it’s wrong to limit poetry through any kind of definition, wrong to say that anything isn’t poetry.

 

I understand the thinking behind this – and maybe at times I’ve been too willing to make absolute statements about poetry. But if anything can be poetry, why can’t anything be a telescope or a burp or an ideology? In which case, what’s the use of words?

 

Can a boiled egg be poetry? Yes, we might say a boiled egg was poetry if we particularly liked boiled egs, or were exceptionally hungry, or if the egg had been boiled to perfection (no easy task). But that would be a figure of speech, like saying it was a jewel or an angel. I submit that a boiled egg cannot be poetry, though it could have poetry written on it. Poetry is an art of words. For something to be a poem it needs words in it. In other words, it’s literature.

 

Two discussions I’ve seen have made a great deal of a poem by William Carlos Williams about a wheelbarrow, which was seen as revolutionary in America and perhaps had rather less impact in Britain. It’s a straightforward description of a wheelbarrow set out in poetic form. I’ll agree that’s a poem, though not one of my favourites, but what about this?

 

PROMOTING YOURSELF

 

Effective self-promotion tells

The market who you are and what

Service you offer. A first step

Should be to create

An individual portfolio

Of images tailored

To appeal to the target

Market.

 

(“Writers’ and Artists’ Yearbook, 2012″: The Freelance Photographer, Ian Thraves)

 

Now why am I inclined to think this is not a poem? It’s set out like one. It starts with perceptible rhythm and ends with a half-rhyme. But it lacks intensity. It’s an ordinary wodge of prose text set out in short lines (in case the penny hasn’t dropped – I set it out like that). I’d suggest that any poem should be capable of making us stop and pay attention – should have an impact beyond the normal. I’d suggest also that the poem should at the very least be capable of being effective when read aloud. The roots of poetry are in songs and rhythmic chants, both of which can for example be heard at a football match. I personally believe poetry which loses this connection with sound, with meaning conveyed through sound, has lost a large part of what makes poetry special. The poem can be – I just hold back from saying should be – conveying a message both through the meaning of the words and through their sound.

 

What about Williams and the wheelbarrow? It seems to me what he was doing was fixing our attention on something apparently unimportant, just as a visual artist might put a pile of bricks or an unmade bed in an art gallery and in effect say, “Stop and look at this. It’s worth it.” And so it might be, though the effect on our life may be small, as we can’t react to everything we see in this intense and reverent way or we’d never get from one end of the street to the other. I’ll not question that this is art, though I’ll spend more time with Turner and Kandinsky, with Yeats and Hopkins, who are connecting the immediate to something profound and hidden.

 

Oh, and there is a word which includes something set out as poetry but lacking intensity or depth. It’s called verse.

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by simon7banks on April 21, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by simon7banks on April 21, 2012

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Nightingale Remembered

 

“Thou wast not born for death, immortal bird,

No hungry generations tread thee down”

But nightingales are begotten, born and die

Living a lifespan lesser than a dog.

 

I sing back not to the immortal song

But to the bird that might not last the summer.

 

Though fumbling in the enveloping folds of time

I hear what Spartans at Thermopylae

Recalled and what some thornscratched hunter heard

When humans first had wandered across sands

Into a colder, richer, trap-strewn land;

And when I smell salt water or top the ridge

Where treeless, manless, sweeps the unmarked waste

I am not the first, and clustering, unseen eyes

Share, and another mouth remembers taste

And lone and many, the nightingale’s notes rise.

 

The quote, of course, is John Keats’ “Ode to a Nightingale”. I remind myself that actual nightingales are birds, beings with individualities and short lives – but join Keats in fining the nightingale’s song a link to other humans who heard it.

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by simon7banks on April 19, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Nature, Prehistory
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Posted by simon7banks on April 19, 2012

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If we deconstruct these poems, we can put all the letters in a different order!

OK, I know “deconstruct” doesn’t quite mean that, but it has a chilling, dehumanising sound. I don’t want to dehumanise my poems, though maybe throughhumanise them. Here’s some more with comment.

DIGGING DOWN

I have found an old guilt:

By scrabbling in the dirt with callused hands

Brushing away the low lying deposits

Stories of murderous giant and cackling troll

Caressing away the grime I find the skull

It grins at me as if to say: what I lost

You lost, my killer friend.

This could relate to a number of things and I wouldn’t want to close off those avenues for people reading it. However, what I had in mind was Neanderthals. These close relatives of “homo sapiens” were specialised to survive cold and hostile conditions and lived in Europe and South-west Asia through a period of ice ages and interglacials. After Homo sapiens, having spread out of Africa into the Arabian peninsula, reached the main mass of Asia and Europe, Neanderthals disappeared, though hanging on for some time in Spain and Portugal.

When Neanderthals remains were first identified, they were characterised as brutish “cavemen”. Bit by bit the stereotypes were knocked down. They were not unable to stand straight – that was a careless conclusion from the skeleton of an old man with arthritis! Their hunting methods showed a high level of ingenuity, planning and co-ordination. Their brains were on average slightly larger than ours (but their body mass was somewhat greater, and some think the brain/ body mass ratio is what counts). They had the physical equipment needed for speech, and given the evidence of rapid development of co-ordinated hunting, it is very likely they had speech. About twelve years ago I remember a TV programme confidently asserting that they had no art – but since then two examples have been discovered, of an apparent flute and a worked stone with bone inserted to make a face, that are hard to explain otherwise than as art. Their extinction in the face of competition from sapiens was attributed to a limited diet short on fish and seafood – but for some Neanderthal colonies, even that no longer stands.

What happened between the two species is largely a mystery. They were so close ecologically that they would certainly have competed for limited food and shelter resources. Drastic climate change in Europe around the time they disappeared will have worked against them as they were best at hunting in forest and much of the forest vanished. The two species may have fought: we just don’t know, but it seems likely over scarce resources. It was long disputed whether they might have interbred and it is only in the last few years that DNA analysis has proved they did – but very early in sapiens’ spreading out from Africa, so all humans today except pure Africans carry some small Neanderthal genetic heritage. Maybe some day we’ll find out what it is.

This poem is written on the assumption that our species did play a part in the extinction of our close siblings. The skull is a Neanderthal one. The deposits removed are of low-lying soil but are also low, lying sapiens stories about neanderthalis. I suspect some mythical beastly and threatening human-like creatures may contain representation of other humanoids, in particular neanderthalis, and trolls seem quite a good fit.

We have lost from the loss of an allied species. “No man is an island…therefore do not ask for whom the bell tolls. It tolls for thee.” (John Donne).

EVOLUTION

In random clash of chemicals

Hot flow over new rocks

There are no palisades or names

Tall fires burn

A thinning smoke is lingering;

In the anonymous wash

Something has happened.

Something begins to pulse, divide,

Feed, organise,

Ally.

 

Water is life: the oceans, the one body

Teem with a writhing dissonance of life

Creatures are born and die

In this world are no boundaries or strongholds

No sharp hard barriers but always danger

But here and there dead hardness meaning death

To anything washed up there: barren land.

 

In the half-dead, half-living place

Something survives and changes.

Life finds land.

 

Among the crumbling bones of the giants

That fire struck down in sea and marsh and forest

Under the dark and smothering, strangling sky

Small creatures scurry: one line is broken, but

Another rises for a while.

The giants’ cities hang with tumbling flowers.

Some titles don’t tell you much, being more a first line of the poem than a description of the subject. This is a straightforward title: the poem is about evolution. It starts with chaos before life. Life organises to perpetuate life. Multi-celled organisms are organisations of cells which still resemble unicellular creatures. At first life is only in the seas – a fertile source of food and of predators, living and barrierless. Land means death. But then living organisms find ways of adapting to live on land.

We then jump to a disaster that has destroyed “the giants” but left small creatures as successors. It’s natural to think the giants were the dinosaurs  and the successors were mammals, our ancestors – but did dinosaurs have cities?

The poem is deliberately rough-edged and irregular to help convey that early chaos.

IN THE VALLEY OF THE STONES

This valley is thick with time

It seems to coagulate in my hands

Only to slip through them

The sarson stones lie randomly round an axis

Or clustered in small groups like some

Ambushed patrol. The hillside terracing no longer

Cares for the crops, only sheep manoeuvre

Round the stubborn lines

Who came here when the glacier withdrew

Who farmed here, that is in the time

That laps round these soft hills and asks for questions.

What will be here, I’m deaf, I cannot tell

Is it there somewhere in the swirling

And slowly settling time, or on the wind

There to be caught or dropped and in the balance?

The Valley of the Stones (that’s its name) is in Dorset. I may be wrong in suggesting a glacier reached that far south in England. It’s a remarkable place because big oblong stones called sarsons are scattered across rough grassland. It would be natural to assume that they were man-made and abandoned there, but they’re not. Standing there, I felt a strong sense of time and past, almost palpable. I try to convey that here. So if somehow I can sense the past, what about the future?

all text copyright Simon Banks 2012

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by simon7banks on April 17, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Discussion, Environmental, My own poems: discussion, Myth, Nature, Poetic forms, Poets and poems, Prehistory
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Posted by simon7banks on April 17, 2012

http://simonsworlds13.wordpress.com/2012/04/17/if-we-deconstruct-these-poems-we-can-put-all-the-letters-in-a-different-order/

By the Gate

BY THE GATE

The cloaked man waiting by the gate

Shivers in the warming day

The planned arrival’s running late

West wind drives the clouds away

 

The cloaked man taps his booted feet

Fumbles out a stained small case,

Stares at a photo; fingers beat

On holster; silence in his face

 

A movement down the uneven road

Pulls him to a straighter stance

The guards decant the expected load

Through the gate the groups advance

 

The gate is shut. He has to wait,

Hears a skylark in the sky.

The man’s gone through another gate

And like the load, begins to die.

 

My primary thought about this is that this is a German soldier standing guard when a group of civilians (Jews? Partisans? Villagers dying because a soldier was shot nearby?) are taken to their deaths. However, he could be a soldier or policeman of many other nationalities and causes, and only a few relatively inconsequential details (photo, holster, the implication that the “load” has been “decanted” from a lorry) prevent it being a picture of something happening in some ancient empire. It could be happening in Syria now.

The soldier, like many, cherishes reminders of family, home and loved ones. He has walled off his mind from the suffering of the condemned people. The poem suggests that this means a kind of progressive death – of mind and spirit.

Copyright Simon Banks 2012

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by simon7banks on April 14, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by simon7banks on April 14, 2012

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Selected Poems of Simon Banks

(Well, about half my poems don’t make it on to the word file. They may survive in a handwritten notebook, or they may have been scrawled on a piece of paper and then I don’t rate them. From the word file a selection gets posted here – and from that, some which most seem to need explanation, background or discussion, get reposted here.)

So now for the next batch.

THE KEMP OWAIN SEQUENCE

METAMORPHOSIS

Seeking a great prize not identified

The lost prince pads wet-footed from the sea

Having heard rumours of a weird thing

A ravenous monster with a hint of speech

An evil dragon crying for a mate:

Circling of gulls shows him the way to climb

They take the scraps of bloodied flesh around

The female devil growing from the tree.

The warrior has a sword well-blessed and forged

A gap in sliding clouds can now unleash

Light from the imprisoned sun to make the sword

Glint like a fire in Prince Owain’s hand.

A sign of Gods to trust the sword and strike

But though a warrior he does not strike

But stands before the long-haired nightmare thing

And hears it speak: come here, kiss me and win

The prize you cannot even know exists.

He kisses her through tangling hair and stink

Of death or sickness and the sun goes in

As if a shadow is falling. As he stares,

“Kiss me again,” she says. He is still human,

His hands not wizened or hairy, even the scar

From that old fight still itches on his chin,

But for the thing he kissed, cavernous eyes

Have filled and narrowed and the maddening breath

Smells not of death but only dangerous night.

He kisses her. The withered breasts grow young

The claws recede. “Again,” she beckons him,

But the dull day has turned to starless night.

He hesitates, gropes for his darkened sword,

Then throws it down and kisses her again.

She feels soft, the smell is sweet. “Turn round,

Pick up your sword and throw it in the sea.”

He turns and throws the holy sword away

Night becomes day, the lady’s live and lithe

Twining her hair with his beneath blue skies.

SALMON

I will be good to you for half the year

For half the year I’ll need you: we will love

For half the year, but for the rest I’m gone

You cannot send a message or a gift

I will not speak, I’ll have forgotten you

Till I return in spring.

I range the seas and have no sense of land

I jump the rapids with a single aim

If I escape the bears and fishermen

I will remember land and feet and thought

And come to you again.

CANDIDATE

So Owen Kemp arrived at the Reception

Where they conducted him to a conference room

Milling with others aiming to achieve

The same great prize. Then from the highest place

A woman’s voice spoke soft and rich and clear:

“Welcome. We’re glad you could attend today.

We have devised a battery of tests,

We hope you’ll find them fun as well as right.

So Owen answered all the riddles set

Like whether he felt nervous in a crowd,

He linked the dots to make a cockatrice

Devised a way to escape the universe

After a coffee break, beat all the rest

At memory games and four-dimensional chess

He tricked the lion from its hoped-for kills

And then the wise ones called him in alone:

“Thankyou, but we were really looking for

A team-player with good networking skills.”

DIVISION

The man talks on his mobile phone

(A rodent hanging from his face)

He has a message to receive

An awkward meeting’s going well

But needs his word to clinch the deal

A momentary annoying thing

Speaks of the hidden and unreal

But what concern is salmon or seal?

The sea is calm, more like a lake,

And never broken by a dive

Of wandering man, has never held

A salmon that had breathed and run

All time’s cut up in hours and dates

The sea and land each know their place

Sandcastles are the only gates

The long-haired woman wails and waits.

Kemp Owain(e) is a mythical hero featured in some ballads and early poems. The name itself is very interesting because while Kemp is Germanic (kampfen, to fight – hence Kemp, a warrior). Owain is Celtic Owen, native to Wales, Ireland and parts of Scotland. It may also be the same as Gawain in the Arthurian legends. So Kemp Owain appears to be a figure emerging from the “Dark Ages” when a Celtic British identity, having been abandoned by (old version) or having thrown off (new version) Roman authority was overlain by a Germanic, Saxon culture coming across the North Sea. While the extent to which the creation of a Saxon English identity was violent ethnic cleansing, and the extent to which it was a kind of cultural imperialism (you lot are all going to speak English now) is still uncertain, interpretations have shifted somewhat from the former to the latter. A mythical figure with Celtic roots taken up very early by Saxons would fit this.

The first part of the poem is a rewriting of a real surviving fragment, in which Kemp Owain meets a repulsive being who turns bit by bit into a beautiful woman.Is it too melodramatic? I have some reservations.

The myth of a sea-creature which turned into human form, made love to a human woman and left, appears in several songs, though it’s usually a seal not a salmon. The focus is often on the fate of the offspring. The salmon appeals to me because it’s seasonal and it inhabits two worlds (sea and river) depending on the season. I suppose this section expresses the way we may always just know part of some people.

The third section is a satirical account of a modern appointment process. Kemp Owain has turned into a candidate being put through hoops, but the hoops still suggest a weird and supernatural element. Perhaps that disqualifies him?

The last part shows the messages of myth and unconscious being ignored. The busy businessman has a momentary strange perception but dismisses it. Why are sandcastles the only gates? I’m not sure, but it seems right. Perhaps the sense of something beyond ourselves, which we have lost, is recoverable through childhood and the two-world nature of the shore.

I think the last two lines are as good as anything I’ve written. The vision of the first part is still waiting.

WESTERN

Wild Bill Hickok with failing sight

Grips the cards held in his hand

Ghostly faces gather round

The door behind him opens wide.

 

Panicking cavalrymen, unhorsed,

Scramble towards a grassy ditch

The condemned Indians make the kill.

 

A straight hard highway stems the land

Flat fields of wheat that wave and brush

The memories down to subsoil worms.

This poem describes two famous moments in the history of the American Wild West. Wild Bill Hickok, brave and maverick lawman, is shot dead while playing cards with his back to the door, something he always avoided and tried to on that occasion. His sight was failing fast at the time.

General Custer’s detachment is wiped out by Sioux Indians/ Native Americans whom he had attacked believing their number to be small. Recent archaeological study has confirmed an Indian account that at the end the surviving soldiers broke and ran down a slight gully where they were killed. But in the long run the outcome was irrelevant: the Indians were in turn slaughtered and lost their land.

I suggest in the last verse that the blandness of the modern Mid-west hides something important in the memories. By the way – I haven’t been to the Mid-west, but I suggest that sort of thing about many different societies!

BUNKER

The murderer sits down in his chair

A job is neatly done, the splintered steel

And brains are out of sight

Signs of power round the walls

Remind him of name and cause

But he is not there

He is cast off in flow of light

Sound of a language lost and found

Touch of a cool calm lake

Scent of the forest pines, footfall

A violin, a gentle drum

 

He killed the drummer long ago

But the drumming sound goes on.

Usually I resist identifying unidentified figures in my poems with any specific real person, but this poem is mainly about Hitler, who loved classical music (not just Wagner) and whose extensive collection of records, fortunately looted by a Red Army Jewish captain and brought to the public by his son, included works featuring Jewish composers and performers. The signs of power are Nazi insignia. The Russian captain apparently could not understand the contrast between the mass murderer and approver of the “Final Solution” and the music lover who could appreciate the work of Jewish musicians.

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by simon7banks on April 13, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Dark, Historical, Journey, My own poems: discussion, Mystic, Myth, Nature, Poets and poems, Political, Seasons, Uncategorized
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Posted by simon7banks on April 13, 2012

http://simonsworlds13.wordpress.com/2012/04/13/selected-poems-of-simon-banks-24/

Wall

 

When the grey seas beat down on this low wall

Remember us who built it high and died

We knew the fish of the sea, we knew the soaring falcon,

We tasted bread and wine and love and loss.

 

This isn’t any one particular wall, but I’ve encountered many places that would fit.

 

I think this is a record – the shortest poem I’ve posted here and coming just after the second longest.

 

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by simon7banks on April 7, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by simon7banks on April 7, 2012

http://simonsworlds13.wordpress.com/2012/04/07/wall/

Well, among the multitude of possible interpretations of these obscure poems, these will do as well as any

and gain a modicum of credibility from originating with the writer.

 

So here goes with some more old poems.

 

TOMORROW

 

After a month of night, a reddish moon

Illuminates a new world, smoothes

The slivers of metal, softens the swathes

Of jagged concrete to

A pebble beach. The clumps of bodies become

A silvered sleeping army of dancing elves.

Nothing human moves,

But deep rats scrabble towards the surface

In the wounded rivers

Dragonfly larvae wait, and where the great trees stood

Fern spores survive. There will be

Another turn.

Tomorrow the relentless sun will rise.

 

This is a science fiction sort of poem. It imagines the world just after a great disaster, probably human-made, has wiped out humanity and most other life forms – but not all.  It has been dark for a month because of vapours and debris but now a degree of light is returning and we (whoever we are) can see what has happened. The surviving living things are stirring. “Tomorrow the relentless sun will rise” – evolution will continue and perhaps there will be another intelligent species to take our place (and bring disaster?). The rising of the sun is relentless – and whether that is a statement of hope or of despair, the poem does not say.

 

TOLLESBURY PIER

 

Through tussocked field, in winter waterlogged

Scrawled over with briar, the bank, like broken road

Between two towns now dead, reaches the shore.

 

Then as a gravelled hump, a fossil arm, breaks mud

Struggling with tide and frost; and then a scatter

Of blackened spars point out across the channel.

 

This thing was an ambition, a conversation

Of land with sea, England maybe with Holland,

A pier for fishing smack and pleasure party

Somewhere for a tired man to walk

The bank, to carry excited trains or vacant

 

Falling into a gradual decline

Hardly noticed thirty miles away

Then broken in war by men who knew it well

To stop an enemy blown up, and on the stump

Strong lights and anti-aircraft guns conducted

A different conversation of the worlds.

 

The waft-winged harrier now suddenly

Swivels for urgent pipits, a vagrant bunting

Flushed by a rushing dog whose reddening master

Stumbles angrily calling

 

The salt sea

Still laps the land

Lulls its lost senses, shifts the empty shells.

 

Tollesbury is a coastal village in Essex on the East coast of England. Today there are only a few clues which tell of the railway and pier. Now Tollesbury village is no longer on a railway, but then it was and the line extended out from the village over marshland to the pier. The original ideas was for the pier to be used by large ships from across the North Sea, but that never happened. Instead it was used by pleasure boats and fishing boats and by pedestrians on a day out. By the time of the Second World War the line had closed. The pier was then blown up to stop it being used by German raiders or invaders and on what was left anti-aircraft guns were positioned (“a different conversation of the worlds”). A few wooden stumps still indicate where the pier was and the raised bank used by the railway (“the bank, like broken road”) is still evident.

 

A harrier is a type of bird of prey sometimes found in such marshy coastal places (two species might occur here). Pipits and buntings are smaller birds which might be hunted by a harrier.

 

I used to write a lot of poems about particular places, but now I generally see this as too forced and wait for the places to work on me unconsciously. This is an exception. I’m attracted by the sense of history about the place and by it being a meeting-place of sea and land.

 

Copyright Simon Banks 2012

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by simon7banks on April 5, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Environmental, Historical, My own poems: discussion, Nature, Political
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Posted by simon7banks on April 5, 2012

http://simonsworlds13.wordpress.com/2012/04/05/well-among-the-multitude-of-possible-interpretations-of-these-obscure-poems-these-will-do-as-well-as-any/

Empire

 

I usually find I can’t sustain a long poem unless I’m on holiday alone, able to get away from unusual distractions, even though there will be other things to think about.  That’s what happened here on a holiday. I’d felt I had a poem in me about the collapse of a glorious and cultured empire for some time.

 

EMPIRE

 

1

The empire’s heavy with scented blooms

A thousand scents, a thousand shapes

Umbellifer and ornate lily

The darkest iris, palest rose

The old Recorder of the Flowers

Each month in leather and brass bound book

Records the new varieties

The rich museums have many rooms.

 

The empire sings a thousand songs

Each city sang a different tune

Last year, each temple has its own.

The imperial gardens’ vibrant birds

Cannot outsing ten thousand choirs

The Emperor hears each song that flowers

Remembers one his mother sang:

Though blurred with power and wine, he longs.

 

The book of all the empire’s guards,

The armies, fortresses and fleets,

Defeats the sourest minister

Who’d number them and set their place

The sun on ranks of helmets shines

And blinds the eyes of tired bards.

 

The queen is in her carven tower

With silver and ebony interwoven

With jumping deer and dolphins’ play

With measured mark of rose and clover

And all the screens that ring her bower

Show everything that grows and dies,

The struggle of a sandy farm,

A somnolent priest’s ingenious lies,

Regiments changing hour by hour.

 

2

A restless baby cries as though

It never cried before, the cock

That rules a servant’s smallholding

Triumphant marks the dawn’s return.

The bells sound out from tower to tower

Seas in the dawn may seem to burn

To those without the power to know.

 

The clocks grind slow, sand on the wind

Has clogged them, the astronomer

Has lost the stars in clouds of dust

The birds sing less, the attentive guards

Along the watchtowers of the walls

In sandstorms see the ghosts of men

In dust devils the shaking heads

Of trampling horses of the dead

And nothing when the blur has thinned.

 

The famished horsemen, lifeless shacks,

The starving women, rag-held bones,

The baglike carcases of goats

The drying up of ancient wells

In the uncounted and unflowered lands

Reported by the empire’s spies

And clients set moving old replies

The walls grow thicker, more patrols

Search for the early warning cracks.

 

The warning sirens came too late

The mechanisms were at fault.

The gates did not shut as they should

In just one section of the line.

The desperate barbarians swarm

Through corridors rising rivers of blood.

And through the crumbling walls of thought

The tangling of all intricate forms

Of gold and music crushed, a roar

Rises: the unformed world’s in spate.

 

3

The gardens are all overgrown

The bells are silent; silent cage

Abandoned where the bird once sang

Is crushed with buckle, bugle, crown

And all that rose up high is down.

 

The children play with sceptre and skull

A rose ascends the temple wall

The smallholding is burnt, and burnt

The servant of the emperor’s will

This wonderful lady’s smile is fixed

Her sparkling brooch is grown dull.

 

The queen still sits in living tower

The images of deer and dance

Still play on all the watchful screens

Comforting the wondering queen

With aching song and shimmering flower,

 

But nothing outside the tower survives

That she would dare to recognise

And nothing is seen but dust and death

By all its hundred thousand eyes.

 

4

The wandering girl has found a thing

Untwisted, goes around her wrist

And polished, sparkles in the light;

The wandering girl begins to dance

And as the tower crumbles down

The wandering girl begins to sing.

 

 

The “barbarians” are ruthless destroyers, but are seen to be desperate for a good reason and to be manipulated by the empire. At the end, something is reborn. What is the queen in her enchanted tower and why does the rebirth destroy her?

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by simon7banks on April 4, 2012  •  Permalink
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Posted by simon7banks on April 4, 2012

http://simonsworlds13.wordpress.com/2012/04/04/empire/

The definitive, authoritative, comprehensive commentary on the poetic works of Simon Banks

will not be written. However, here are some thoughts on a few more poems.

 

ESTUARY

 

The church is early 12th century. Some two miles from here

The Romans crossed the estuary by a ford

Now long impassable

The shades settle

 

I am confused by their weight, my questions muffled

By their insistent conversation

As though wings beat in dissonance, we struggle

 

Before they leave for the drowned land, the sky darkening,

One with a hidden face leaves me a thing

Carefully carved from wood, now pocked by seaworms living

 

I put it to my mouth, it makes a sound

And at the calling, all the shades turn round.

 

I actually gave a fair amount of information on this one first time round. It came to me while I was walking along the side of the Deben estuary in Suffolk with Ramsholt Church on the ridge to my right – hence the reference to the church. As often, the start of the poem came to me straight out of the unconscious and my consciousness then teased out the rest. The estuary is no single real estuary: the lazily beautiful Deben certainly influenced it, but the reference to the Roman ford probably comes from the Colne estuary in Essex.

 

The poem draws on a sense I often have of time past (at least) being present but hidden. For some reason estuaries are particularly liable to get me thinking like this. I wrote about that more directly in “In the Valley of the Stones”.  I begin quite rationally describing the estuary and its surrounds, stressing the history of the place. Then, quite suddenly, I slip into a waking dream in which “shades” try to communicate with me, and I try to respond, but we are on different wavelengths: “As though wings beat in dissonance”. That was an image which came to me ready-made and it took time for my conscious mind to analyse it and find meaning in it. The shades begin to withdraw to “the drowned land” but one hands me a thing from the past and through it we communicate – with what result, the poem does not say.

 

The second and fourth verses are full of soft sounds.

 

I was surprised when this poem was accepted by an established poetry magazine as I thought it likely to confuse by its obscurity!

 

FAIRY STORY

 

Out of the chocolate box pretty

Marzipan plastered cottage comes a sound

A little like a trumpet lesson going badly,

Then settling down

To a low insistant moan.

Outside, the roses and the primroses

Look pleasant and secure. A cat stalks past

Most things are as they were before.

The wolf has not been seen

In this neck of the woods for sixty years

The newspapers passed round

Established that the dragon was a myth

Even the brutal landlord’s growing somnolent.

The semihuman sound’s continuing.

 

A doctor’s called. He makes his measurements

Orders the site closed off behind high walls

Where local schoolkids under gentle supervision

Paint colourful murals full of smiley faces.

There has been no forgotten cottage

These walls are of the natural order

Behind them, we are happy to confirm

There is no gate, no foreign border.

 

Here I use the familiar imagery of fairy stories (wolf, dragon, the pretty village in the woods, lurking danger) mixed with the image of the idyllic English (or German) village (cottages, flowers, a cat). Such settings are of course often used in modern times for murder and horror stories, partly because of the dramatic contrast. So we have something apparently settled and idyllic but which contains horror.

 

The nature of the horror is not specified, but it could well be someone with mental illness: that would allow a quite literal interpretation of the strange sound. The reaction of the neighbours is the nub of the poem: instead of trying to help or investigate, they deny the problem, wall it off, pretend that everything is lovely and deny that the cottage (the source of the problem) ever existed. Were you to go past this wall, they say, you would find nothing frightening or unusual (“no gate, no foreign border”).

 

I don’t make a lot of use of irony, but this irony is almost savage: “Where local schoolkids under gentle supervision/ Paint colourful murals full of smiley faces.”

 

Perhaps the horror implicit in fairy stories is rightly raised there and tackled, and suppressing it leads to more horror or an inability to cope sensitively with fear and strangeness.

 

2 Comments
by simon7banks on April 2, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Dark, Discussion, Historical, My own poems: discussion, Myth
Tagged , , , , , , , , , ,

Posted by simon7banks on April 2, 2012

http://simonsworlds13.wordpress.com/2012/04/02/the-definitive-authoritative-comprehensive-commentary-on-the-poetic-works-of-simon-banks/

The Flying Dutchman

A newly-posted poem. I can tell you precisely where I put it together – walking from the youth hostel just outside Minehead in Somerset and the nearest pub. Minehead, by the way, is next door to Porlock, famous for the “gentleman from Porlock” who according to Coleridge interrupted his reverie when he was composing “Kubla Khan” and cuased it to be unfinished.

 

THE FLYING DUTCHMAN

 

You have a kind of faith I cannot share,

Thomas my saint, the doubt of a darkening sky my glory

And in the wonder of the half-heard things

I march on a stumbling track not for the faithful.

The Flying Dutchman is my dream

But in the end to reach another harbour

Insinuated by the alien forms

Brought on the currents from the unknown shore

Which even then I felt I knew before.

3 Comments
by simon7banks on March 31, 2012  •  Permalink
Posted in Exploration, Journey
Tagged , , , , ,

Posted by simon7banks on March 31, 2012

http://simonsworlds13.wordpress.com/2012/03/31/the-flying-dutchman/

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