My View of The Shannon

The sign advertising the new development in Cootehall at sunset and in daylight. Pretty, no?

Clams!!

A gushing, Gwyneth-type cascade of praise for.......CLAMS!! From Donegal, driven down here to the Carrick-on-Shannon lowlands by one wonderful Killybegs fishmonger, Mr. Gerry Blain (I'll snap a photo for you of this lovely man who could have had a second career in the movies). Gerry sells his fish at the Farmers' Market that comes and goes like a circus every Thursday in the Market Yard in Carrick.

I bought a hefty bag o'clams and an even heftier bag o' scallops in their pretty shells from Gerry yesterday--getting in the stock for the Christmas visitors. But I couldn't wait til THEN, so threw some clams in the pot with wine and garlic for a yummy spaghetti with white clam sauce for din-din last night. My daughter picked the tiny, sweet and tender clam bodies out of their shells and hand fed me (while proclaiming they looked "yucky"). Then she made the clam shells talk, of course.

For ages, there was not a clam to be had here in Leitrim. You'd have to have gone to the coast in Mayo, Sligo or Donegal to find someone selling fresh shellfish. But thanks to Gerry (sainthood would not be out of order here), that has all changed, changed, utterly changed. And I couldn't disagree more with the likes of Michael Harding who hark back to the good old poor days in Carrick when hardly a fresh carrot was to be found in the place. Yes, there's a plethora of shitboxes and ranchburgers blighting the landscape here now thanks to short-term greed, bad planning, graft and worse. But it's not all bad. Prosperity has merits. Clams, for one. John McGahern was delighted that a better life had come, through prosperity, to the denizens of Leitrim. He may have written about misery, especially about how the power-hungry in the Church preyed upon the miserable, but he was wise enough not to love poverty, nor wish it upon his fellow man.

Spotted in the pre-1990 Warsaw-style queue that quickly formed in front of Gerry's fish stall: Mari-aymone Djeribi who bought periwinkles, scallops and oysters. This Leitrim-based- Parisienne visual artist, poet, book-maker, publisher, farmer (I'll stop here, but there's more; you can visit mermaid turbulence, her publishing/book/art website to begin to get a picture) has her own farmers' market stall in Boyle on Saturdays; Maison Djeribi. She bakes the best bread and pastries ever, anywhere, bar none. And with inimitable style. You haven't lived, etc. Go to Boyle, Saturdays 10 to 4 (she's closed for the first two weeks in January though).

I've posted my first film-poem on You Tube

I've posted the first film-poem I've made (did it in 2004) on You Tube. It's called Blow-in, County Roscommon. I'm putting in the link below. It should work, but if it doesn't, you can go to You Tube and search for me by username, which is turkeylondon (as in turkey london broil, a specialty of the house of friend Mark Dark in South Philly!!).

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1gujHlz9ER8

A favourite book: Riddley Walker by Russell Hoban

"You take a figger out of the bag nor it aint nothing only some colourt clof with a paintit wood head and hans. Then you put it on. You put your head finger in the head you put your arm fingers in the arms then that figger looks roun and takes noatis it has things to say. Which they wont all ways be things youwd think of saying o no them wood heads the hart of the wood is in them and the hart of the wud and all. They have ther knowing and they have ther saying which you bes lissen for it you bes let it happen. "I never look for my reveal til its ben." Thats what my dad said time back. My dad the connexion man. In my woal life I've only ever done that 1 connexion which Ive wrote down here I begun with trying to put it to gether poal by poal only my reveal dint come that way it snuck me woaly. I wer keaping that in memberment now. Ready to cry ready to dy ready for any thing is how I come to it now. In fear and tremmering only not running a way. In emtyness and ready to be fult. Not to lern no body nothing I cant even lern my oan self all I can do is try not to get in front of whats coming. Jus try to keap out of the way of it."

I've looked that bit of text over twice, and there's no typos--that's how Hoban wrote it, back in 1980. Have you read this book? If not, I urge you to give it a go. It takes a bit of getting used to as Hoban imagined a language and wrote it as such--it's what English might sound like in England, near Canterbury, after a nuclear holocaust in which all written language (and most of culture and civilization too) have been wiped out. What would endure in us? This is Hoban's question as he writes this most astonishing of novels. He grapples with the biggies: the nature of evil, of art, of myth... I won't waste prose time trying to describe it...Anthony Burgess said it better in his review of the book: "THIS IS WHAT LITERATURE IS MEANT TO BE: EXPLORAATION WITHOUT FEAR."

When I was taking his poetry seminar way back when, William Meredith came across this book (it had just been published), bought ten hardback copies and handed them out to us, his students. We spent a few weeks on it. I still have Meredith's mimeographed notes to us Yanks, e.g.
p.45 "bloaks"-"blokes": English for "guys"
p. 54 "pist"-"getting pissed" means getting drunk, not angry, in England
p. 185 "wanking" - an English obscenity; something along the lines of masturbating.

Musa McKim: painter and poet

The poem wants to tell you about Philip and Musa Guston in their bed
foreheads locked like magnets
how he's charging overnight
on her battery her poetry
warmly whirring.

--from "Erasures" a film-poem, which I promise to upload to my other film-poem site very soon

+++++++++++++++++++++++

Many painters I know love Philip Guston's work, and if they don't all love his work, most love the story of his creative life. I won't go into the ins and outs (ups and downs, more to the point; Dore Ashton's book on him is comprehensive), but what endures in the larger contours of his story is how, in the end, he embraced contradictory creative impulses (in his case "pure" paintings and "thing" paintings), and the jet fuel that ignited when he fully embraced those opposing poles brought his late work into being. The painting here, Couple in Bed (1977, 206 x 240 cm oil on canvas in Chicago at the Art Institute) is from that late flowering.

Philip's wife was Musa McKim. She was a poet. A quiet poet. A reluctant poet. A woman of, perhaps, contradictory impulses herself: toward being the "artist's wife and muse" (Jesus, her name!), "mother" and "poet". She'd been a painter as well at the outset of her creative life. In an afterword to a book of McKim's writings, William Corbett writes about his attempts to get Musa to give him some work to publish in a magazine he edited called Fire Exit. He says he liked the McKim's writings for their "fresh unliterariness. They seemed to come direct from her imagination without having been mediated by art."

The book is called Alone With The Moon: selected writings of Musa McKim (The Figures: Boston 1994) I don't know if it's still in print. I bought it in the art gallery at Boston University (Guston taught there in the late seventies until his death.) The writing is uneven; some of it veers toward the overly whimsical. Other poems are perfectly pitched, showing us a writer of talent and singular taste, one who probably didn't spend enough time at the craft.

Some Music

Maybe this time you have gone so far
been away so long, that you take lacunae
for the mocassins
of your new princess.
Or maybe, by now, the princess is real.
Maybe what is real
is that you have a new princess.

I have looked for you everywhere.
In watering places, in dry places.

Where were you during the sirocco?
Should I have looked for you in the speedboat?
Did the flags get my message twisted?
Were you there, but was I asleep
and therefore invisible in the crowd?

I look for you in Woodstock,
East Hampton, the Cape and New York.
Should I have looked in Europe,
or the Orient?

I look for you in fancy restaurants.
And at Wah kee's--even at Sing Wu's.
And in the old stamping grounds.
There, all is quiet
as earth from the air.

I look for you in the air,
stopping and questioning every jet.
The air hostesses smile and say
"Thanks for stopping PAN AN," Or Eastern,
or American.

I look for you in sky-writing
thinking, sooner or later,
you will send a message that way.

When last we met you said,
"Should I ever want to be looked for
by anyone, it would be by you."

Soon the birds will be perching on my eyes.
Although it is not only with my eyes
that I look.

The neighbors, one of whom is a sculptor,
have built a fence around me
they are so disgusted.

I ease the pain by trying to evolve
into something else.
What could that be, though,
since I am fitted only
for looking for you?

Why instead of distress
signals, don't I broadcast
the news, the weather report,
some music?

I Hoid Dat

"I hoid dat" is the best verbal way I know to show complete and utter agreement. Thus the title for an occasional "feature" on this blog.
This is WS Di Piero ( a poet who has also written extensively on visual art) in the October 2006 issue of POETRY (Chicago):

I read poetry and fiction--the little fiction that I read--more for style than content, for the palpable sense of an imagination re-fashioning reality expressively, where the tics and chewiness and cadences of language are themselves all one passion. When someone recommends a book by saying "It's about a married couple who..." my eyelids droop.

Uh-huh.

Christopher Middleton

Since the steering wheel of this blog has been grabbed by poetry in general and is exiting the Staircase Poetry Project parkway, now merging onto the Poetry & Art Turnpike (what exit?), I thought I would post a wonderful poem. Why not? (As I type this, I am listening to Richard Thompson doing a brilliant cover of Brittany Spears' "Oops I Did It Again" with a great reverb at the end... You can find it on his recent recording, 1000 Years of Popular Music.
Now, back to this poem. One to be read aloud. And written out to feel the careful crafting of its line breaks- a good way to get inside a poem and see it from the ribcage out: this is from Of the Mortal Fire : poems 1999-2002 (Sheep Meadow Press, Riverdale-on-Hudson, New York). Middleton's syntax is always astonishing.

Memory of the Vaucluse

In this French September light
Picking out profuse

Corals that invade the vine,
Yellows in the hayrick

And pools of blue somehow
Round the rooster's comb,

To die–undiseased,
Tending a lavender field,

A naked eye
Braving the angel, who descends

As angels on the loose
Holycards in a junkshop do,

Still with time enough–
Fear forgone, bondage to speech

Waved away–to sense the feathers
Rush and whisk,

Then giving up on it
To stand, the more to live.