Afternoon Of Poetry And Music

Saturday was Rafflesian, the morning spent judging quarter-final debates, the afternoon at the Creative Writing Club’s annual Afternoon of Poetry and Music, which I’ve attended for the past seven years or so.

APM had its usual mixed bag of poetry – some I didn’t get or didn’t like, some that could have been good if their authors hadn’t delivered them so badly, some I wished I was a good enough poet to have written, many I knew I would never be a good enough poet to write. Poems by young strangers and old friends. Lee Tzu Pheng’s beautiful and elegiac Falling Into Timelessness, which I must find and read many times more. Alfian Sa’at’s Autobiography, from that second collection I haven’t read nearly as many times as One Fierce Hour and really should sit down with soon. Musical performances which gave me varying degrees of enjoyment depending on the novelty of their repertoire and the skill of the performers. Handel’s The Arrival of the Queen of Sheba arranged for saxophone quartet, well worth watching. Ploddingly and badly played Pachelbel’s Canon, a real waste of time.

Crepes (quality good, quantity bad) at Raffles City (continuity unintended) with Terence, Yi-Sheng, Cheryl and Miss Ho. Wandering, talking, coffeeing later on, conversation that can’t really be alluded to because of the reasonably private nature of most of it, but I suppose the main point here is that I went home from the day happy and remembering why, according to the Myers-Briggs test, I am apparently an extrovert.

Preferences

I have nothing to say right now that isn’t about jurisprudence (quick summary: love Socrates, hate Dworkin, think Fuller lacks precision, originality and intellect), and outside all is malaise and greyness.

And it occurs to me that I would still rather live here with every day like this than be back in Singapore with no worries and blue skies every day.

I have neither the time nor energy to wade through angst towards clarity, so for now I’m not bothering with either concept. I just want to stay.

One Liners + Poetry Jumble

Newsmax.com’s daily updated archive of one-liners from late night American talk show monologues is an invaluable service to the Lenoless and Conancraving worldwide. Continuing in the vein of shallow low-brow things that I unashamedly enjoy, I watch these on cable in Singapore, and was sorely missing them last night when I lost ten minutes of my life to Jonathan Ross and his mission of boredom.

  • The U.S. military says that even though Osama bin Laden may have left Afghanistan, they will continue to bomb as long as Geraldo is there. – Leno
  • If you don’t laugh, that means the terrorists have won. – Leno
  • The Olympic Torch completed its 13,000-mile journey tonight in Utah. Unfortunately, local Mormons thought the torch was a cigarette butt and stomped it out. – Conan
  • Next week on Sesame Street they are going to air a series of shows to explain the war on terrorism to kids. That’s a good idea. This also explains why Oscar The Grouch is being held in a trash can on Guantanamo Bay. – Conan
  • Happy New Year! If you’re watching this at home, you are having one lame party! – Conan
  • Osama bin Laden is planning a televised suicide. I call that hosting the Academy Awards. – Letterman

Rather less low-brow is plagiarist.com, which has a pretty damn fantastic range of poetry available, including many favourites I haven’t put up here [my old site] yet.

Try some e.e. cummings if you never have, and even if you have make sure you’ve read these:

Variation On The Word Sleep and Postcards are Margaret Atwood discoveries which remind me I really must go buy some of her poetry, despite not always being keen on her prose (loved A Handmaid’s Tale, abandoned Alias Grace, am somehow completely uninterested in A Robber Bride).

Poem: After RM Rilke (Primo Levi)

Just like that, a week gone and nothing written here about it. Cue inevitable cliche (time, fly, fun, blah).

Get thee behind me, Real Life.

For now, have some Primo Levi, who I’ve been enjoying these days in rare moments of solitude:

After R.M. Rilke

Lord, it’s time; the wine is already fermenting.
The time has come to have a home,
Or to remain for a long time without one.
The time has come not to be alone,
Or else we will stay alone for a long time.
We will consume the hours over books,
Or in writing letters to distant places,
Long letters from our solitude.
And we will go back and forth through the streets,
Restless, while the leaves fall.

(You might also want to read Rilke’s Autumn Day, which the above poem was written in response to.)

Sholipshishism With Seamus

As is often the case when work and various other things start encroaching on my usually satisfactory sense of mental stability and general well-being, I’ve been feeling an ever-increasing compulsion to do anything but everything I should be doing.

Hence: tendencies towards extreme offensiveness at debating committee meetings (this would involve interrupting the President’s incessant whinging and acute martyrdom complex by shouting “Well, BOO HOO!”, and then collapsing in helpless cackles), rather too much time and money spent at the hall bar drinking dodgy £1 vodka alcopops, and a general longing to just get out of the hall, the law library, the debating chamber, the entire UCL locale altogether.

Except that most of the time my inertia and disorganization means I end up retreating to my room and music and books, which are all far cheaper forms of escapism than the alternatives that come to mind, but this tends to steep me in solipsism after a while, which I don’t like.

[Speaking of solipsism (or perhaps not, because I don’t think the poem is entirely solipsistic, but it did somehow get associatively recalled by my use of that word) please read Personal Helicon (Seamus Heaney) because I just love it.]

[You could also do with reading Anahorish and Death Of A Naturalist, and pretty much everything else he’s ever written, while you’re about it.]

[You could also buy me Opened Ground: Poems 1966-1996, if you’re feeling generous.]

[Or you could buy it for yourself, which would admittedly make me less happy than the above option, but would nevertheless make me quite happy, all the same.]

Where was I? Oh yes – solipsism. :)

For A Five-Year-Old (Fleur Adcock)

New poet discovery: Fleur Adcock, discovered on Sunday in a book of poetry I borrowed from Mark.

For a Five-Year-Old

A snail is climbing up the window-sill
into your room, after a night of rain.
You call me in to see, and I explain
that it would be unkind to leave it there:
it might crawl to the floor; we must take care
that no one squashes it. You understand,
and carry it outside, with careful hand,
to eat a daffodil.

I see, then, that a kind of faith prevails:
your gentleness is moulded still by words
from me, who have trapped mice and shot wild birds,
from me, who drowned your kittens, who betrayed
your closest relatives, and who purveyed
the harshest kind of truth to many another.
But that is how things are: I am your mother,
And we are kind to snails.

Fleur Adcock, Poems 1960-2000

I want.

Jurisprudence / Vile Magnetic Poetry / Ice Disco

The jurisprudence essay that was due on Thursday is finally finished (yes, I’m aware that today is Tuesday), which means I can finally come into the computer room with a conscience slightly less muddied than usual. I say only “slightly” because the past few days have been classic chronicles of Michellian essay avoidance mechanisms, and I’m not terribly proud of myself right now.

Friday started off normally enough with me snoozing my way through a company law seminar, wandering into Waterstones on a textbook hunt and leaving with the necessary textbooks but also with Birthday Letters (£1.99!) and A Heartbreaking Work Of Staggering Genius (£2.99!), which I then obviously spent considerably more time reading over the weekend than Hart’s The Concept Of Law.

Much of Friday night was spent crouched in front of a fridge laughing hysterically over magnetic poetry at a housewarming party. Justyn’s magnum opus was:

I dream of a goddess
with peach-like breasts
whom I can fall in love with

These somewhat romantic sentiments got unfortunately abandoned later on when the poem was modified to:

I dream of a goddess
with peach-like breasts
who can fiddle with
my boiling meat apparatus.

Our collective muse inspired this, which we’re all rather proud of:

luscious sordid butt puppy
raw finger love smear
screaming frantic chocolate lather
heaving sausage, lust juice.

After a lengthy and satisfying girl talk session with Avril, at 2.30 a.m. I was ready to either sleep or attempt some reading, but was foiled by Russ, who dropped in for quality time and sprawling conversation till the Tube started running again at 5.

* * *

Not content with setting a plastic chopping board on fire and leaving the gas on in the kitchen, Mark decided to continue his mission of chaos on Saturday night by persuading me to go ice-skating. More specifically, ice discoing.

And so it was that instead of a quiet night in with Ronald Dworkin and my laptop, I found myself attempting to get my groove on to the Wu Tang Clan amidst daredevil twelve-year-olds and strobe lighting while flailing around on badly fitting ice skates.

Stranger things have happened, but not by much.

* * *

Sunday involved dejection after an absolutely dreadful choir performance in morning mass, elation after an incredibly beautiful choir performance in evening mass, and ultimately, a very worn out and stressed me after having to play the organ for both masses and the choir practice sessions before them. Having said that, sitting at a piano flanked by a charming Gibraltan improvising jazz and a mad composer dude improvising Pavement (I kid you not) proved to be a bit too much of an antidote, and I ended up returning to my neglected textbooks far too late to do anything worthwhile.

* * *

As a result of all the weekend indiscipline, I expected Monday’s attempts to finally write the bloody essay to be excruciating, but it wasn’t as bad as I’d thought. It certainly involved prolonged mental agony and intellectual self-scourging, but somehow the pain was vaguely pleasurable. This jurisprudence thing might just work out. Fingers crossed.

Poetry Readings Not Just For Ponces

So there’s the bunch of us poetry types, awkwardly situated in the Borders history section such that poor unassuming history types wandering around in search of The Fall Of Byzantine or whatever had unexpected encounters with Luke’s asshole musings or Yi-Sheng banging a book wildly against his head while shrieking:

Mary had a little lamb!
Do you like green eggs and ham!
I love you and you love me!
Frame thy fearful symmetry!
Let us go then, you and I!
Like a diamond in the sky!
EIEIEIO!
Happy birthday and hello!
(from A Loud Poem to be Read to a Very Obliging Audience, by Ng Yi-Sheng. One of my favourite poems by one of my favourite poets.)

I enjoy poetry readings. Even the ones that reek of pretension amuse rather than annoy me, and most of the readings I’ve been to in Singapore have generally been populated by people who go there for love of the craft rather than some self-pleasing agenda.

I remember John Agard and Grace Nichols in the Substation courtyard, infusing candle-lit night air with their fascinating rhythm. I recently described our backfired attempt at comedy during an open-mike session in the same place. There were all those readings at the National Library as well – Luke reading Climbing Mount Biang (I can’t remember how it went exactly, but it was something like “After climbing Biang/You realize that the only thing worse than going up Biang/Is going down Biang/Wah biang!”. The last two words are a Hokkien “exclamation”.), some Aussie guy singing a strummy thing he called Dolphin Song and the sound guy behind him cracking up because it was so laughably bad, and always at least one poem that managed to touch me.

Earworms

Music moments that won’t leave my head this week:

  • The rhythmic riffing that opens Fugazi’s Red Medicine (my first ever Fugazi album, but it definitely won’t be my last). Catchiest thing I’ve heard since Bye Bye Bye. :P
  • The eight note sequence in Ana (Bossanova, Pixies). You hear it for the first time about 30 seconds into the song, and it starts with four ascending notes. I have no idea how to write about it other than referring to the notes that make it up, and just listing the notes doesn’t come close to explaining the grip that little sequence has on me. The best I can do is to say that those last three notes seem to almost chime.
  • The trumpets in Wagner’s Tannhauser March. Simple, sunny, jubilant.
  • “Plaaaaacing fingers through the notches in your spine” (Two Headed Boy, In The Aeroplane Over The Sea, Neutral Milk Hotel). This album is a universe of wonderful moments, but this one stands out this week, simply because I like the line, and it reminds me of a line from one of my favourite poems.

          And I am learning him, learning
    the journey of him, the journey of the
    cobbled spine and the contours of muscle,
    of tongue and lips and teeth, of the old scars and
    the steel-toed heart. His warmth winds around me
    and his voice binds me with a whispered word.
    I trace his veins to their fire source and
    dissolve into them, and find the shape of him
    in the heart of a flame.
          He is the poem I travel.
    — One Winged Angels, Koh Tsin Yen

I might see Yen later today if she goes to the poetry reading I’ll be at this afternoon – it’s to promote onewinged, an anthology of young Singaporean writing named after her poem. I’ll ask her if I can put the whole poem up here.

Anne Sexton

[The poetry collection was on my old site – it’s not hosted here any more, but I’ve tried to replace the old links with links to the same content elsewhere on the web.]

I don’t usually write commentaries for the section of this site where I collect poetry I love (never having studied literature beyond the O’levels, I don’t feel qualified), but after coding my favourite Anne Sexton poems, which are the latest addition, I feel compelled to write something.

To me Anne Sexton’s poetry is inescapably tied up with the course of her life, and much of it maps that tragic life out to its end: suicide, age 45, after losing a long battle with mental illness; read the poems knowing this, and sometimes you cry.

Yet all isn’t doom and gloom. Poems like The Fortress, Little Girl, My Stringbean, My Lovely Woman and Live pulse with love and life, and I chose to end the collection with Live, even though its joy soon faded with her later poems, and its wonderful ending is now more elegiac than inspirational, knowing that.

Then there are the lovely ways she uses words:

You lie, a small knuckle on my white bed;
lie, fisted like a snail, so small and strong
at my breast.
(Unknown Girl in the Maternity Ward)

Your feet thump-thump against my back
and you whisper to yourself. Child,
what are you wishing? What pact
are you making?
What mouse runs between your eyes? What ark
can I fill for you when the world goes wild?
(The Fortress)

The Abortion: subtle imagery which I missed the very first time I read it, hard-hitting and painful ever since.

Read Anne Sexton. Please.