from Fathomsuns and BenightedTrans Ian Fairley. White Noise, bundled, |
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wiki image by Tatyana Zelenskaya Anna Politkovskaya 30/08/48 to 07/10/06
I will add in a few blog posts and information pages at the end of this post which is in the manner of remembering the importance of this woman writer politically and acknowledging the work she did in Chechyna.
Light is Speech, by Marianne Moore (excerpt)
“One can say more of sunlight
than of speech; but speech
and light, each
aiding each- when French-
have not disgraced that still
unextirpated adjective.
Yes, light is speech. free frank
impartial sunlight, moonlight,
starlight, lighthouse light,
are language. The Creach’h
d’Ouessant light-
house on its defenceless dot of
rock, is the descendant of Voltaire.”RIP Anna Politkovskaya (1948-2006)
Here are some links to information about Politkovskaya via The International Women in Media Foundation, My Blog and Politics.ie:
Anna’a Page at IWMF.
International Women’s day ‘Remembering Politkovskaya’
dot’s blog
Letter of Protest to Putin. -
The Mystery, by Douglas Hyde*
I am the wind which breathes upon the sea,
I am the wave of the ocean,
I am the murmur of the billows,
I am the ox of the seven combats,
I am the vulture upon the rocks,
I am the beam of the sun,
I am the fairest of the plants,
I am the wild boar in valour,
I am the salmon in the water,
I am a lake in the plain,
I am a word of science,
I am the point of the lance in battle,
I am the god who created in the head, the fire,
Who is it who throws light into the meeting on the mountain ?
Who announces the ages of the moon?
Who touches the place where couches the sun
(if not I)I do not have a book for this one, it’s transcribed from a bilingual Spanish edition in the keeping of my wonderful friend, I will of course ask him to send me the details so I can publish it here. It’s a beautiful poem by Douglas Hyde.
From Skywriting, by Dennis O Driscoll
On midwinter day, sun excavates
the entrances of passage tombs,
surveys their corbelled vaults, revives
their spirits with light touch.
And slabs of weather-beaten stone-
wedged on heathery mountain tops
that offer panoramas of five fertile counties-
carry boulders like the weight
of the world on granite shoulders
receive a warm overspill of light,
as do these giant incisors- a ring of
standing stones- which form a sun trap.I highly recommend ‘Skywriting’ by the way, it is taken from Reality Check by Dennis O Driscoll, publ. Anvil 2007, sure I know – was at the launch in RCSI on the Green.
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Poetry Ireland at the Unitarian Church Last year’s Dublin Culture night, wherein mostly all Dublin venues are open to everyone and include galleries, museums, film and readings was fantastic, especially the Poetry Ireland Open Mic sessions down at the Unitarian Church on St Stephen’s Green. The church is often used as a PI venue, indeed I visited to hear the belated International Women’s Day celebrations in 2008 also.
The evening begins at 6pm and goes through until 11pm; and once the poets are signed in for their allotted seven minutes they can come and go as they please. Last year slammers, irish poets and new poets vied on the pulpit memorably, with Ulick O Connor followed by an
LA slammer (t’was hilarious). Ulick colour codes his pieces and had a sheaf of original material nested beneath his arm as he ascended to read. I highly recommend the evening and shall leave an info link at the base of this small piece.I heard that Parnell Square had good writers doing the readings and talk also.
Poetry Ireland Open Mic evening, Unitarian Church, St Stephen’s Green, Dublin 2. 6pm-11pm 2009.
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Panorama of BCN via Wiki . I spent this early morning at the funeral mass of a neighbour and I have not had time to think about what poem I would like to publish today. Yesterday, whilst looking for some paperwork
and files, I found a small hand bound book of poems that I had made in Barcelona last year. It’s provisionally titled The Archivum, partly because I found myself at least twice in the Cathedral of Pi (Gothic quarter) and therein is a small courtyard with railed in trees, the paving slabs are endowed with varieties of images and symbols, mostly skull and X-bones. Before one gets to the courtyard, there are two coffins on a shelf bearing crosses, that, my friend assures me quivered and rocked about during the Cathedral occupation; and then a sign Archivum.For some reason the little book contains two finished poems and volumes of notes/drafts , all forewords by a quote from The Unnameable by JP Lovecraft I have said it here before, Lovecraft is creepy; but not really scary. The poems are in Irish and describe Loch Lein and Catalunya breezes.
I am unsure whether to publish them in full or excerpt , as they are more draft than poems. I thought I had lost them in my endless files and am glad they are recovered. I also came across a blue Craftsman’s Notebook , which is chockfull of images (they all start as image) that never quite made it into poems but does show my intense preoccupations at that time. It’s blue bound with a small elastic holding it together. I did not study it too closely but intend to later on today.
There is a poem on Poethead entitled Santa Maria del Mar which I am adding in at the base of the piece. I am interested in conservation and apocrypha, thus can only assume that the two small books were filed together in an odd place for later finding.
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Doris Lessing I have referred here before to the book that creeps me out the most,The Fifth Child , indeed I took down my copy again last night to read up for today’s post; but I ended up deweeding the garden where my tree was being invaded by a parasitic alien Clematis, and my rose’s roots being pushed up out of the ground by rogue bamboo shoots. I Am sore and embattled after taking up the roots. I digress, read Doris Lessing for intricate mature writing.
I am not so fond of the sci-fi stuff but do adore also The Golden Notebook, which I have not read in a small while.
Very few readers get to enjoy that peculiar attention to detail of the real writer, indeed in Plath, Lessing and Lavin it is most evident. Plath referred to it as The thinginess of things , it is a fine lacemakers attention to detail, which we mostly miss in an era of mass-media noise . I have read many books but this unique quality ismost evident in women writers, I think I’ll throw in Julian of Norwich there whose unique use of description has lasted centuries. I suppose I do get amazed whilst reading media and other modernist pap tha the woman’s voice and attentiveness is so wholly absent, except maybe in some historical writing – most notably in Lady Fraser’s writing.
So, on a busy morning I wanted to recommend the writing of Doris Lessing, the Poetry of Sylvia Plath, the short stories of Mary Lavin and the historical writing of Antonia Fraser. There is an excerpt linked at the base of this short note, along with an image by Ann Madden, whose Megaliths series seemed appropriate to the content.
Excerpt from the Fifth Child
Mary Lavin
Lady Antonia Fraser
Doris Lessing org.
The Fifth Child -
I refer in short to the Google Book Settlement as the GBS throughout this series of posts, the links for which I will include at the base of this short piece.
Yesterday there was a meeting of the European Commission (07/09/09) re the GBS which yielded what Irish Media refer to as concessions to European authors and publishing houses.
How Big of Google to recognise that the GBS is an irritant encompassing:
i). Breach of copyright.
ii).No robust data privacy rules and the use of deposit library relationships to advance the GBS above the heads of authors.
The Telegraph referred to the meeting as out for European authors and betwixt the two lies a truth. The manipulation of the Berne Convention to subvert intellectual property rights law in an era wherein governments (such as In China) can proscribe forms and words that they disprove of incl. the utilisation of search engine terms (such as in the Green Dam youth filtering software) would point to Google vying for a market dominance without the requisite ethical approach to Freedom of Information and data privacy.
if you can make a word vanish in China you can remove books from the digitisation project at the behest of government, not to mind that the GBS scanning omits pictorials and forewords.
I am adding in here the two P.ie posts on the issue:
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Snapshot of an Orchard in Port Angeles
(for Mrs Georgia Bond and Stanley Kunitz)
The woman worked all her youth on Lost Mountain
marking trees to be cut,
and gave birth to five children.
Now, old and a widow, she takes care
of her orchard,
When her daughter brought the poet from Provincetown to visit,
the old woman was proud to show him
her oldest tree : pinus aristata- the one never marked
for cutting- that is, the deathless one– she added.
The poet doubted this; ‘I am afraid you are mistaken.
The oldest tree in the world is metasequoia
glyptostroboides– (also known as the Dawn Redwood)
and it has more lives to live. Well, what do you think?
Which one of us is right, madam?’
She answered: ‘A man lives as long as his life, mister,
but a poet lives as long as your tree with a strange name.’
He liked her answer so much that on her birthday
he sent by telegram to a nursery, then by truck
to her doorstep, his own tree, the Dawn Redwood,
and a card : ‘May this tree grow near yours.
Let their shadows annul each other reciprocally
so in your orchard
light will grow free forever’.
I have mentioned Liliana Ursu’s book The Sky Behind the Forest before, it is translated by Tess Gallagher and Adam Sorkin. Bloodaxe 1997.
A Bonnard Blossom tree.
Chris Murray 