Poetry Animations
This is both very cool and just a bit creepy. Jim Clark, a "videographer" based in London, has animated photos or paintings of long-gone poets, paired the animations with poetry and you get things like Lord Alfred Tennyson "reading" his Ulysses:
While I'm sure some of the animations will be removed due to copyright violations (Sylvia Plath? TS Eliot? Oh yes, their estates will be in touch), Jim Clark has many excellent (and, again, creepy) videos uploaded to YouTube. Try some of these:
+ John Donne: Go Catch A Falling Star
+ Ezra Pound: The Year Puts On Her Shining Robe
+ W.H. Auden: Musee des Beaux Arts
+ John Keats: Ode To A Nightingale
A good reminder that poetry is as much about hearing as it is about reading. And just a touch disturbing.
PS. Uncanny valley, anyone?
Comfort Reading
The last Christmas present has been wrapped (Misty Garden by Jo Sharp in Rowan Damask), I have had a lovely pre-Christmas get-together with friends and I 'just' need to pack my bag now.
Yes, that was a slightly hysterical 'just' there. Christmas stress has finally set in and I'm getting slightly frayed at the edges. What do you mean that I 'just* need to pack? Don't you understand how that means I need to find matching socks, clothes that match and a suitable knitting project?!
Thankfully I have enough time to sit down and think to myself: "Yes, TS Eliot has wonderful sentence structures" which automatically means I am less stressed.
The child wonders at the Christmas Tree:
Let him continue in the spirit of wonder
At the Feast as an event not accepted as a pretext;
So that the glittering rapture, the amazement
Of the first-remembered Christmas Tree,
So that the surprises, delight in new possessions
(Each one with its peculiar and exciting smell),
The expectation of the goose or turkey
And the expected awe on its appearance,
So that the reverence and the gaiety
May not be forgotten in later experience,
In the bored habituation, the fatigue, the tedium,
The awareness of death, the consciousness of failure,
Or in the piety of the convert
Which may be tainted with a self-conceit
Displeasing to God and disrespectful to the children
Eliot's "The Cultivation of Christmas Trees" is rather obscure as Eliot poems go. It is a continuation of the mystical-religious poetry he wrote in the mid-1930s to late 1940s - the poetry that hardly ever gets anthologised and only occasionally gets taught. I am not a religious person myself, but I derive much comfort from Eliot's poetry (both the heady early Modernist period and the mystical late years).
Today it was a pleasure and a respite to sit down with "The Cultivation of Christmas Trees" and just let myself drift into the convoluted-ness of it all. A pleasure.
Oh, and happy birthday to my mother who is ever-young. I don't know how she does it but I suspect she must have a portrait hidden away in the attic..
When I Think All Hope Has Gone — R.I.P. Adrian Mitchell
Adrian Mitchell has died. His The Oxford Hysteria of English Poetry is seriously funny:
Then suddenly --- WOOMF ---
It was the Ro-man-tic Re-viv-al
And it didn't matter how you wrote,
All the public wanted was a hairy great image.
Before they'd even print you
You had to smoke opium, die of consumption,
Fall in love with your sister
Or drown in the Mediterranean (not at Brighton).
And in the mid-1990s, Mr Mitchell suddenly found himself credited as co-writer of a big UK hit - The Bluetones and their lovely "Bluetonic" single - as they quoted a snippet of his poetry..
Rest in peace, Adrian Mitchell. I've always really, really liked you.
Either I’m Nobody, Or I’m A Nation
Oh, my president-elect crush burns strong: Barack Obama seen with poetry collection. Of course it's not just any old poetry collection, it is Derek Walcott's Collected Poems. A Nobel Prize laureate; a Caribbean poet straddling colonialism, post-colonialism, and the Western canon; someone who proclaims ".. either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation". Of course, as Bookninja warns, it could be a coldly calculated photo prop, but I like the idea of Obama reading Walcott. It makes sense, y'know?
Maybe Obama is just returning the favour. Walcott wrote a poem on the occasion of Obama's election victory: Forty Acres: a poem for Barack Obama.
Read more:
+ Derek Walcott: The Schooner Flight (and I've always maintained that Walcott is re-writing Eliot's The Waste Land with that poem)
+ Derek Walcott: The Sea Is History
+ A Life in Writing: Derek Walcott
+ Buy Walcott's Omeros - an epic poem/novel-in-verse charting the "restoration of our shattered histories, our shards of vocabulary".
On Beauty
When I was at university back in Denmark, I'd walk across the Amager Common from my student halls to the faculty. I'd pass by a huge rose bush with beautiful yellow roses, D.H. Lawrence's Gloire de Dijon echoing through my head. The roses have long gone, thanks to urban development, but the memory of their beauty remain.
Beauty continues to matter to me. Throughout my life I have discovered beauty and savoured it. Poetry, art, rock formations, landscape, things people have said, music, colours and textures. I mentioned poetry first, not only because it epitomises and distils beauty and I experience the world through words, but also because the etymological root of 'poetry' is the Greek ποιητης - poïêtes which means 'artisan, creator, maker' (you still find that in the Scottish term 'makar'). Beauty is poetry is creation. And this brings me to a new way of experiencing beauty that I have only recently discovered.
I am currently finishing a lovely red cardigan and I find myself getting lost in its beauty. The stitches are slightly uneven and the buttons are a touch wonky, but it is beautiful. I work with wool which is clearly the product of a sheep's fleece, the colour is stunning and I already have beautiful memories* tied to making the cardigan.
And then I happened across this blog entry which says it so much better than I ever could:
People talk about friendship and community and getting back to the roots of handcraft when they reference [craft] blogging as a movement, but there's something else about this craft movement that I think is really special and I haven't seen folks talking about, and that's beauty. Redefining beauty. Taking beauty BACK from the magazines and the movies and the Botox parties and the red carpet. Taking it back into our own hands.
I have always seemed able to capture beauty, but I had no idea that I could get caught up in its creation too. It is a wonderful, empowering sensation.
* Mags, a good friend now living in London, unexpectedly showed up in Glasgow yesterday whilst I was finishing one sleeve. I will think of her every time I wear this cardigan.
PS. This all links back to ideas I have about feminism, craft and knitting groups, of course.
Self-Awareness
Nothing says GEEK quite as much as a grown woman shouting "Byron! Byron, you idiots!" at University Challenge. Whilst knitting a jumper.
Is It Only Tuesday?
You know what I abhor? The phrase "one of them". I was told Saturday that all foreigners should leave Scotland and when the speaker learned I was foreign, he qualified his words with a "but you're not one of them" excuse. If I had a penny for every time I have heard people use that phrase, I'd be knitting cashmere sweaters. It's a lousy, cheap way of trying to seem less xenophobic and more inclusive, but the phrase only makes the speaker appear more racist and exclusive.
Anyway. Sorry for that mini-rant. It has been a long week even if it is only Tuesday. My head is pounding and I still haven't had dinner (because cake does not count). Let's go for some delightful links.
+ Viktor & Rolf's Barbican Exhibition. Side-by-side comparisons of runway models and quite creepy dolls. Interestingly, it took longer to recreate V&R's clothes in doll-size than it took to create the original runway look.
+ Interesting Bookcases and Bookcase Designs. I used to know someone who lived in a 17thC Copenhagen townhouse and who'd use the rafters as her bookshelves. It was awesome. I really like the children's bookcase-bedroom, actually. Wonder if it would be possible to recreate that in an adult size?
+ The Word Clock. What it says on the tin.
+ Czech uranium glass buttons. Uranium?! I came across these listings on eBay and I still don't know what to make of them.
+ I'm not a huge fan of cupcakes but this shark attack cupcake mountain is fantastic.
Finally, Charles Bernstein on the current global crisis:
Let there be no mistake: the fundamentals of our poetry are sound. The problem is not poetry but poems. The crisis has been precipitated by the escalation of poetry debt—poems that circulate in the market at an economic loss due to their difficulty, incompetence, or irrelevance. Illiquid poetry assets are choking off the flow of imagination that is so vital to our literature.
I Will Drink Life To the Lees
It's deeply unfashionable, of course, but I love me some Lord Alfred Tennyson. "Ulysses" continues to resonate strongly with me:
I am a part of all that I have met;
Yet all experience is an arch wherethro'
Gleams that untravell'd world whose margin fades
For ever and for ever when I move.
How dull it is to pause, to make an end,
To rust unburnish'd, not to shine in use!
As tho' to breathe were life! Life piled on life
Were all too little, and of one to me
Little remains; but every hour is saved
From that eternal silence, something more,
A bringer of new things; and vile it were
For some three suns to store and hoard myself,
And this gray spirit yearning in desire
To follow knowledge like a sinking star,
Beyond the utmost bound of human thought.
Tithonus is magnificent too. What gets me about Tennyson is how he is often branded 'sentimental' and 'feeble' (mostly by my beloved modernist poets and critics) - and yet the poet I encounter strives to understand the world around him through characters (just like my beloved modernist poets). I read Tennyson's dramatic monologues and find a restless mind. That's someone as far from sentimental and feeble as you can get.
Now, I've never understood the love for Robert Browning..