Thursday, April 26, 2007

Some of the jealous Guardian sparks are hacking critically impure thoughts, pulsing negative synaptic activity and dull psychic energy, which impelled an eruption of intellectual poetry.

FOAM IN SHYER

Incertus hermit in attic rite

Appeared wielding a key-pad

His poetry written in the tap

Verse language, its currency a pool

And exploration leading her mind

To Patrick, butler of William no more


Yeats a magus, his sister Elizabeth
Sought elemental gods at Helicon

Heights, flopped and allotted Cuala

His muse of habitual address


Breath-goddess imprinting a Word
His sidhe-marked borders unwind

Spoor as breeze through spiritual

Knowledge dead generations guarded


Ancient miming gods on the cusp

Of being wrought within a complex

Arbiter silly Willy, his love the daemon


Decoded symbol of god their custom

Paladin truth rode in Amergin

Rote on a quay riotus wordic


Love the Liffey broadwalk Dublin air

River deciding flow and ebb from urge

drop, cop-on gods turn out your tune


In a sea
Beneath steps
Sea bound salmon
Listened for nuts, fish
Swum through squalls

The audience of water talking

Sedate enthralled shameless

Divining life's uplift of force, Maud:



"I uncertain as waves circulate and obsess

Island herd me into the unmentionable

Offence original error poetical seeding."


Isuelt said to a rabbit unlucky in love


Man who knew the art of inversion

Self inactive living within vellum

Who liked his donut dipped in opium

Factory Mac his Mo mechanism darn

Sock hoed optimum ground reason


Tow-psychosis in theocracy

September the first New York

Poland, Adolf and the boys.


"Don't you just love them"


Democrat George thought Bill

Said mishearing mistress speak

Pulling a foot back sprung flush

Feet sing down up ignore ballast

Crafty conning ear-conquerer

Belfast artist posting ground back

Name Falcon of Horace Tyrannius

Ruffinus and Oregin rolled on a tongue

Colum's dove oak ascending one's note.

Thursday, April 19, 2007

A beauty crowns thee amigo.
Short and sweet is the way to go
so lets have a think
about what to succintly say
keeping the message
love, peace, just wanna not
run out of space.

Hi Wordnerds.

As I write this it occurs to me that you may never read it, as the original post has slipped off the opening portal of the Irish Poetry hall of bores who duel on Le Gardien.

A net-pal - Wordnerd7 - expanding their intellect in one of Southern California's educational groves pointed out on the Guardian Books blog that - going by the URL addresses - it seems many Irish contributors to that august web-site aren't that fussed on Seamus Heaney and dismiss him as unimportant.

And the sunny Californian is right. Many self confessed Irish literate know alls are indifferent to the Mossbawn Magus, I suspect, because of the pronounced green gene of island jealousy, seeking to diminish his gift by claiming it's all hype.

It's like U2. Everywhere in the world they are tops and Bono often mistaken for the messiah residing in their local myth, his tearful fans collapsing as the shaded one shimmies onstage in crepe lifts to transport us to the rarest height of musical abandonment.

Yet ask the avergae rocker in Whelans pub in Dublin (muso central) about him and they proffer forth dreary dissections intending to prove Bono and the boys are actually less talented than their own band, the Spacial Faces.

With four in the group, led by an identikit simpering man with the personality of ten day old mince - whose sole musical claim is a sub standard Liam Gallagher hairdo - this make believe gang self-delude and show great un-intelligence, as to top Bono they would have to have a number one album by the age of twenty two or so.

This shows a deluded detachment and paints their line of belief to be below the threshold of reality.

Most poets in Ireland believe they will never reach the height of eloquence that the Anahorish warbler's ascended to, and they signal their limit by publicly trying to argue - behind the annonymity of net-names like "kfc," "AlarmingLondon" and the like, that a man with clearly greater talent is somehow less linguistically able than they are.

The true test would if they went head to head with him in what in Irish is translated to "call and return," an extemporised poetic form, similar to two rappers battling it out, whose literary formatt is what we do here online.

Knowing the chance of Heaney responding to their public utterance about him is zero, they babble in numbers and mistake the weight of opinion for a truth, all nodding in agreement and taking succour, safe in the group delusion that their most important living poet is crap.

Heaney is the islands first "native" voice whose reputation has transcended that of the Anglo-Irish pre-cursors This bunch held imperial and warped ideas about the civilising of the natives for so long, they almost succeeded, but Heaney stopped all that and is a reflection of how deep and spiritual the island's genuine poetic is, and how different from the various shades of ideas within - some good intended - racist toffs who took it upon themselves to appropriate the island and steer her inhabitants in sufferage for so long their offspring tried to forget what the original reason for being there was, and ingratiate themselves by tilting a downward nod and acknowledging the humanity their recent forebears chose to ignore and slaughter.

Heaney does not seek to lay out a grand masterplan of how to "rule" the peasants, like Yeats, but for the first time in Hiberno-English poetic history, the long, long process of Ireland re-claiming her voice was effected, free of the planter mind-set seeking to speak for Her, the island goddess of memory.

Saturday, April 14, 2007

"Music means harmony; harmony means love, love means God."

Sidney Lanier

+++


The Symphony (Edited Extraction)

When Nature from a far-off glen
Has flute soft messages for men,
Will this flute play again,

Goddess, alone sweetly singing,
Breath through life's strident polyphone
And flute-voiced world whose pure tone
Sweet friend,
Human love ascending
To finer and diviner end
Than mere human thought, can comprehend
For one
Whose fibre plies,
The weft in airs of harmony,
Demanding a science of why
Man's tender pain crys inward
And sky-gods mating earth with sky.
Do not overbold:
But hold
And manifold Nature’s power.
And speak of each no-tongue tree
That, spring by spring, dumbly
and wistfully
Their mighty prayerful arms outspread
Above men's unheeding heads,
Bless, big their bough shedding downward
Speaking all-shaped bloom and leaf,
Lichen on stone and moss on eave,
Grass and grain in rank and sheave;
Broad-fronded fern and keen-leaved cane,
Briery mazes, bounding lanes,
And a marsh-plant, thirsty-cupped for rain,
With milky stem and sugary vein.

For every long-armed woman-vine
That round a piteous tree has twined;
passionate odor, divine
Pistil, and crystalline petal;
Whose purity of shaded spring,
And shyness of film-winged things
That fly from tree-trunk and bark-ring;
All modesty of mountain-fawn
Will leap and covert from that form,
And tremble as the day dawns;
Sparkling small beady eyes
Of birds with side-song glances

A tragic jay whose piquancy
And prickly bur,
Smoothness of eider down
Minerva fur;
And viscous honey limpid
At the stamen-base,
A humming-bird rogue,
Bee-thigh buzzed, fawn-butterfly;
All gracious curve and slender wing,
Bark-mottlings, fibre-spiraling,
Fern-waved and leaf-flickered;
Each dial-marked branch and flower-bell

A wind-sighing dove in melodious moan,
And night's unearthly under-tone;
Ofl placid lake and waveless deep,
A cool reposing steep mountain,
Vale-calm and tranquil lotos-sleeping; --
in fair form, sound, and light, warmth,
mystery and might
Of Nature's utmost depth and height,

These my timid tongue present,
The mouthpiece and lead instrument
Servant and all love-eloquent, sounding

"All for love" when the violins cry:

"Give me love, so long denied."

Shall lovers higgle, heart for heart,
Till wooing grows a trading mart
Where much for little, and all for part,
Cheapen life, love and art.?

Fair Lady:
Shall woman scorch for a single sin
That her betrayer may revel in,
And she be burnt, and He but grin
When the flames begin?

Fair Lady:
Shall this maiden plea
prevail?

"We maids would far, far tender be
If that our eyes might sometime see
Men's maiden purity"


Forever
Fair Lady:
Shall Trade eye and salve His conscience-aches
With jibes at chivalry's old mistakes --
The wars that your hot knighthood makes
For Christ and ladies' sakes,
Fair Lady?

Now each knight that ever prayed
To fight like man and love like maid,
Since Nechtan's wife was Boann's blade,
Who eyed the scabard where death lay
Erupting in flood as wetland-plain
Fair Lady,
Who dare avouch that faith is bright
In gods of rite and gods of might.
Who time has not changed their hair to white,
Nor my dear love to spite,
Fair Lady.

I doubt no doubt: I strive, and shrive my clay,
And fight the fight in a patient modern way
For true love between us and pray
To be your pawn until my dying day,
Fair Lady.

Make that knightly horn end and spur away
Into the thick of a melodious fray.

And when the hautboys play and smile,
Life, you sea-fugue, written from east to west,
Whose love alone can pore
Dissolve the score
Of harsh half-phrasings,
Blotted when writ,
And double erasings
Of chords most fit.
To love you
Sole music-master, mistress blessed
Who read my weltering palimpsest.
May we follow time's dying melody,
Never lose the old in the new,
And ever to solve a true discord --
Love alone must do.

And Love heard poor-folk cry,
Humanity sighing and ever sweet faith
Hooded, death-defying,
And innocent child's implicit wisdom,
But never a trader's gloss, slavery, knaving
Or lying.

Gods' harmony will then be heard,
Though long deferred, though long deferred:
Over modern waste a dove has whirred:
When Music is Love in search of the word

+++

The name Sidney Lanier is known to far fewer European than American readers. Whether he was born a poet, none but the galactic engineer of the Deus ex machina, scribe and universal tribe of humanity executing a plan gods and goddesses behind Sidney Lanier's mind, only know.

His career-chronology was the incantory rote-memorisation of a Southern Lawyer's bright son and light-boy annalists can make the gentleman with, in an enobling geaneological haunt through the printed record, the eye will fix and chaunt to re-daction.

Sidney Lanier was - at various times - a student, teacher, soldier, professional concert flautist, practicing lawyer, writer, English literature professor, poet and life long learner, who mastered and ascended through an impressive breadth and variance of artistic and secular disciplines.

He was born in Southern Alabama on February 3 1842 and died at 39 - September 7 1881 - after a two decade fight with tuberculosis, which claimed his body, but which his spirit transcended, as it subsumed in the physiological flame prematurley quenching to ember; it's intellectual mass and grasp soaring in inverse ratio to the body's decline.

As Lanier's end drew near - in, what in the longer span is, the first flush of middle years - so his mind blazed more intensely with knowing, the fierce power of it's source recorded in a dazzling array of sound-properties his ear divined from the oracle of nature's aural utterance, he translitterated to oral form via the method of compositional thought in which music is accorded equal weight to that of syntax, sound and sense swirling, hinged in equal balance on an iron age line of clunky magnetic sound, rivetted to a magnetic rip-tide of undertow, the linguistic force a metrical cortex, where the currency in language polarise to flux.

Lanier's life was conterminous with Gerard Manley Hopkins', born July 28 1844 and dying on June 8 1889 in Dublin, where his somewhat despondent body and soul had struggled for for the previous and final five years of one whose muse in first brief bright flush of effervesent and affirmational spark, gave way to bouts of guilt about God.

He swung ever less frequent, casual snaps of spontaeneous joy, followed by long withdrawel to the pits of self loathing and uun-release at his inner penitentiary of hopeless cloud and gloom discharging densely in ever more muffling claustraphobic dissolve, until typhoid claimed this 5' 2 " religious poet, two years after a slump into continual ill health signalled the copper fastening of his reality seeling his reputation: a manically minded quare and clinically depressed priest, unable to reconcile his "gay" centre with God.

Hopkins was an Anglican convert to the Catholic religion and jesuit teacher at colleges in the North of England including Stoneyhurst near the Lancashire village of Hurst Green, whose alumni include 12 ex-pupils who were the recipients of posthumous beatification, three with post life careers in sainthood.

Even cursory analyses along the clear metrical track on which these two men trod, reveal a polar-opposite physiological path was taken, but they shod their poet-shoe to a very similar middle English feet, clomping and clanking along in Anglo-Saxon alliterative meter, the poem's language-vein earthed clearly on the critical map.

Both poets attempted to prose-out this foxingly complex cognisance of how detailed the compositional system they discovered in the alliterative field of middle-english literature actually is. In the simple binary of poetic enlightenment, Hopkins is cast as poetic failure of two humans unconnected and living on different continents, with a similar poetic spoor that compare.

The evidence Hopkins' left, ultimately sway a judge to deliver the verdict of "failed-masterplan," the proclomation, being "out,"out of the question. He became a jesuit instead of openly gay, causing him self-imposed exile, delusion and an ineffable God without the goddess, subserviant, Goddess lusting after Eros, Lugh, Finn McCool and how it affects the Manly language of chance and failure, the prayer garbled answer unreliable, absent from the peak of joy, present inthe pit of despair.

His earlier system of air was successfully launched, his earlier work bouyant, affirmational, God is good, present, correct and crisplyHomeric and un-eroded by the ocean of self-loathing, the profoudly spiritual squall and storm of thought yet to plague and empty into his cauldron of experience, whirring easy, free and in love, until a tragic death by drowning, his muse, Digbeth Mackworth Dolben, who Hopkins had fallen in love with when at Oxford and upon first seeing Dolben, an outwardly flambouyant and openly homoerotic wit, also poet, who Hopkins was madly in love with.

~

Sidney Lanier entered Oglesthorpe University near Midgesville, Atlanta in 1856 as a precociously talented sophomore student and son of a local lawyer, then graduated first in his class four years later and took up immediate employment in his alma mater, where he taught for two years, until joining the the Confedarate army in April 1861.

A young man interested only in books and music who had two short years of adulthood learning the art of educational empowerment, beneath a collegiate coat of arms whose motto - Nescit Cedera - He does not know what it is to give up - was coupled to a charge of three boars' heads.

This heraldic devise, whose learning-purpose of tacking an oath of feality to life-long learning and mastery of the broad brush of universal gift in all things that turn a gentlemanly Georgian's mind first to civil-war, and from then on his intellectual grasp was exercised all his short life.

~

But whereas a thorough inspection of Irish literature would have aided Hopkins in his quest for a perfect and complex working meter, his time in Dublin soured, and using Welsh poetry to find his balancing facts, Hopkins wrought the evidence of straightforward utterance, sounded tinged with an accurate amount of bardic interest and laudable regard.

The meter in Lanier's The Symphony is aptly sprung and springs before us the first word-clue in the world, or "poetic" of a poem.

We experience and recognise word-suggestion for what is, the forward motion associated with a fixed point of visual reference, from which something coiled, springs or flits to. Commas are suggestive of this, see?

The primary stress is one of upswinging motion, the verb approaches. A cat on the ballard about to leap, dart hitting bullseye and panther on bough or leopard in a cage eyeing the line of sight to the moon above a Zoo Keeper's head.

It is strikingly clear Hopkins and Lanier are unequivically, equally and undeniably, unique poets, whose critical personae behind what the intellectual eye had sighted, were obsessed by prosody and sought a "pure" poetic, one suspects, whose grain agitating as an oyster-germ, was an alternative to Humanity's muse few are chosen to practice.

The unfair oddity about sprung rhthm is that the god accredited for its coinage erupted only from one source, Gerald "Manley" Hopkin's, God in the cannon of coiled verse.

When consciously drawn to examine the route of this charge by tracing back through the printed transaction it's currency is responsible for bringing to pass, it becomes clear that the tortured Gerald was not alone in his quest. That a man 6000 miles away was ploughing a furrow of startlingly similarity.

But whereas the sniggering oxymoronic mind can deal cruel hands of pre-ordained longings that caused Hopkins to self-bind over the course of his life, ever tighter and more tortured as time wound him ineluctably in towards the biblical critical mass of belief in tragic showers of self-bullying fate dappled tawny non-cruisers on a highway.

After a perfectly North London time of being a happy flower, Hopkins trotted to Balliol College Oxford. BCO, spies, writers, and artists the globe over known by a hand-cant of waggle, in thumb to middle digital-tip, jerking wrist toss and jiggle.

Hopkins starred his way through Balliol, all in the ranks affirmed his crown of premier colligiate poet with a first class mind in the classics. Top laurel, lock of baize holding hardy Greece, Rome, Myth, kiss me You, He who were so whoever names it, is the capital chap capped at the cricket pitch, one top clod for god-fancying Hopkins falling in love in Oxford, on location where he met the two men who de-mist his history and allow us access to what ghost of memory's dark-cloud scud a bi-polar sketch of tragedy clot in a deep, physiological urge and effulgent need to route, understand and sit on the core seat where poetic roots coil and sketch his tragic understanding and the trajectory of Robert Bridges.

Robert Bridges was the pivotal publishing influence in Hopkin's life. It was Bridges who also introduced him to not an Aphrodite muse, but Hopkin's Eros. Digby Mackworth Dolben, the god Hopkin's co-drew when he became posthumous, sorrow's datum distinct and original as Lanier Baudelaire, Verlaine or Rimbaud, the Decadent or Poète Maudit - the Accursed French Poet, all executing their doings as Hopkins and Lanier lived time in the immediate half century post first brutal flowering of a new global Republic and Pain proclomation, demand and utterance for human equality.

Lendier was a man with a different capacity, whose thirst was not the drunken addiction that accounts for a dissolusioned state, but a consumptive seeking cure for the tuberculosis he caught during the five months spent in a military prison in Maryland at the end of the civil war.
Lindier seeks to praise love as being the pure force of Godness, eloquently and evenly expressed. The flip side to this incredible flight of scape which configure on the page via his glide and verbal thermaling, is the gloomier sound in the material, I opted to operate on and remove in the make-through.

~

Lanier's poetic acheivement is above the ordinary field of sociological play and cultural flux, his art a mirror on the time more clearly real, his solitary and unique inner struggle of 39 years before succombing to tuburculosis, which he'd contracted after 5 months in the Maryland military hospital and which he removed himself from on foot in a very poor state of health, striding out on a seven week trek home, going back to Georgia after five years fighting, first as private in the same regiment as his brother, who did not seperate during the war, serving in the same regiment, Lanier always reading and working towards a mastery of the musical instrument for which he is forever linked and balancing this half of his poetical practice with a written form of release.

Landier's inelectable dixieland destiny at the outbreak of the American Civil War was as a Confederate soldier, whose ghost now moves and haunts in innocence of years abruptly ended when the long-hual of so much unrecorded and forgotten shifts of minor to major key- tremors, semi-quaver and a unit of air-weight most do not apprehend, fly about in sound of gods prosodic scale and drop to het jazzy hep-cat doing bendy yoga moves that drew a meeting on the page not to order, but the hood and lynch post Reconstruction, redemptionist klan of cracker-tongued Redeemer-scum and trailor-trash begging biblical forgiveness for masked punishment whuppings with a bible's thick belt and hellfire, going on back home to Georgias, always burning on my preacher's mind-prick divinely sought.

His brimstone was ordered for ending life in the flock of eternal sinning little boy, silence, removed to forgivness, charity, hope, all freedom and right of natural knights in poison and splendor whipped a light-godness to cork top, de-colonise the culture code, cream of music in a tragedy of absence, invention and remeberence of their past ancestor-pile, honest reflection, opining our ghostly recollection, the porcine daemon reconciled to Sidney guiding Lanier at a time when the barbarous fact of slave was a life-reality facing the artist compassing a force to America's cultural-compress, as he struggled on the long road home.

The financial explosion the vacuum of peace sucked awash in a reforming zeal of the post-Lincoln Republican Party’s political-economic coalition of carpet-baggers, freedmen and scallawags - southern whites.

In the 8 years of the Reconstruction period of 1865-1873, collasal sums were invested into the newly liberated South and this time saw the highest level of Afro-America's political intergaration American history can boast. Tragically and against all norms of human decency this sweet short promise of freedom's breath was cruelly expired at it's first pre-awakening bud as - on the 3 March 1866 - Republican Rutherford B. Hayes was smuggled into the White House to take Presidential Oath in secret, cloaked dagger of democracy and tulmut of civil war had led to a hit on the first truly Republican frontier king Abraham, grandfather killed by Indian arrow, born in the dirt at Sinking Spring, a large boy and man with an easy manner and hatred of slavery, reared himself to read the Waterstone law bible and become a successfull attorney.

Abe's ghost paraphrase, tell, twist, split the word in two:

"Either the opponents of racisim arrest it's further spread and the public mind will rest in a belief it's course is one of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it is lawful in all States, old, new and all points of the compass, government cannot endure, permanently half racist and half not. I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided."

Bother, splother, it's one thing or all the other after it become's, Hayes ensconced in the red room of paraphrase.

Rutherford Hayes was "Rutherfraud," to his opponents, there to serve up the Redemption, the return of Slaveocracy in government, the sudden brief spurt of emancipation, carved up to stop and reverse, freedom lost and locked away, the pulse in the gush of liberation suddenly turned off in unfair and oppressive legislation of delusional imperialist's in moral decline after the bitter and devisive election where both sides did as much as they could possibly deny and acted as corruptly as they could, Republican Rutherfraud winning with 250,000 less votes than his rivals.

The obvious reason a done-deal and stich up between Republican and Democrat, agreement that Haye's pulls all federal troops North and abandons democracy plans to the dominant klan bossess, racist businesses doctrine, with freshly pious and repentantly Southern partner whites their weld, wield and flex of political force of an inchoate Democrat party and oxymoron, firmly repelling any practically aided ideas of continuing the oxymoronic emancipation of a defeated and silently united race, regarded as legitimate human property, their intellectual owners, wrappers up with language, whose capacity for religious duplicity to subliminate - after a decade wound-licking - via capatilistic connivancy and ruthless accusations at it's Republican opposition, that endemic corruption and violation of true Paine ethics were being inherently enacted by a force of - somewhat innacurately methinks - biblical wickedness, and - what came to pass as - the Redemption was needed

Espousing with Bible force at the heart of politics, pre-cursor Democrats, Redeemers spouting scripture and with nothing but hatred to keep their spirit from sinning, who clung mind bogglingly on and morphed into the Democratic party proper, declaiming a rhetoric of appartheid, exclusion and the process whereby a scallawa minority will of whites opting out of Reconstruction en masse and tipping the finely balancing national power, to re-annoint the pursuant force as a southern Slaveocracy fettering true Afro-America from flowering.

Thus the gentlemen spake in the olden, golden boom of bowery, dock, canning-plant, days when both Lanier and Hopkins, independantly and unaware of one another, through the fabric of narrative in their career histories, where a difference between

"Hello Father"

"Hello sailor"

And Lanier soldier Hopkins a priest born in Stratford, Essex, the eldest of eight children and son of Catherine and Manley Hopkins, an insurance agent and consul-general for Hawaii based in London, learning still with Anglican belief in his first alma mater, Highgate School, public and lofty above the lesser rank and order, leafy walk, cricket in the woods and Highgate School, where his first light of learning also shone bright amid a time when the average was of waxing stock.




A turbulant, short and somewhat murderous address for the dominant reality in a near past of the early bud -- ever increasing -- of all-technological modernity and continually new-age of the unpolluted pastoral voice of early Romanticism, waning as Anglo-lingo's premier poetic figurehead, England's Horace-equivalent of Wordsworth, who embossed an artistic definition, age and movement, got chopped, became a former premier, slowly stagnated, as his earlier force dipped from the peak of being "there," alive and gushing subliminal in the moment of Oneness ina Wood and lots of capitalisation for explaining important bits of the whole Construction to get into the copse of crispy picture and frond tickly Mayfern, made up in a kingdom of la la, the mind, William no longer danced on air through, but declining in slump beyond his return to dotage.

The Kavanagh-esque "kink" that makes Hopkins a real poetic macoy is his homoerotic battle raging on-page at his early Oxford journals that document the sublimated lust to feel and trajectory with his Muse and fellow poet, Digby Mackworth Dolben, whose death by drowning devasted the then 23 year old Hopkins, whose object of clear physiological thirst, reality removed and Hopkins spent the remaining half of his life in strict and severe seclusion, wrestling his tortured poetic spirit to upright the cauldron of self morality, the maze of ritual and less spectacular academic trek through creation, theological discipline, his conscience constantly, wrestled, match in cerebral machinations charachterised by severe and immense intensity that swung from inner summit to trough and valley from peak-mood where Manly's intellect crafted a male God who unlocks a key to what Hopkins defines "inscape" - essential preposition of the tantalising, unique and yet ultimately incoherent critical system offered us, that gyre as lofty and out of common touch as one’s in Yeats or Graves' white goddess, essentially knowable to oneself only, if at all, seeing as it's


,
The later less arresting and visceral height below which Wordsworth's early and middle poetical-power had sung, declining to the song of mechanical reality becoming an ever more and all-encompassing sublimation, importing history and human consciousness displaced, an entire pitch of play dividing opinion on how natural langauge is and over-laying belief inherent in the marrow of love's syntax, is an all-life-form metaphor and prayer humanity chooses, true sky-gods and stone-goddessess who demand you suffer what pin his or her hope on man or maid will prick and draw joy, sorrow, blood, tears lust, love and spend eternity combing in shake-down, sharpening their wit and tearing teeth at history's fact snapping a clamp on logical knowledge.

A poet with wider reach than most other contemporaries, Lendier stood apart from his tortured French counter-parts, whose crest upon the movement's anti-heroic shield was Baudelaire's Fleur de Mal whose bole of legend carved in a dark pitted-thrall of the enfant terrible expressing extreme boredom and dispising the self and pointlessness in those around them, are minds lain waste by a cocktail of poor social conditions shaken to an art of poverty whose muse of alcohol and narcotic reflection flits in a pool where the mental terror-addicts fix the co-ordiante identies of their personae to physical person, whose radically different personalities still blent, connected by threads of chance, creative will, cognising apart, plied in silent syncretic fusion via a human force of script, forgiver and forgiven, the meek humble speech sprung pre-cursor to a rhythm of the macaronic method scattering a tongue's rememberance back along it's original lingo-loot route, to plash through a celestial word-stem, sift the universal unfettered beauty on a quest to float in utterance, incantory bubble, blather and effable booty breathed atop of what thermal mystic peak of sound did fleet speech reach and noise from.

These coalesced into "The Radicals," of allsorts eager to assist in - what began - the century-slow process of tortuous, begrudged and ill mannered emancipation, after it's tragic first and ultimately faltering start that federal government abandoned to the complicit and guilty inverse underbelly on which the America Dream evolved it's blinkered chimerical myth of liberty and freedom of utterance un-extorted but freely procalaiming in a civil exchange of lanague tempered by tolerance and as much good will, empathy and shared understanding as we are capable of acquiring.

Some who travelled this short carpet-ride through the cruelly brief Reconstruction period in recent American history, had fully enfranchising motives, but sadly too few to outweight the many more, less noble and entirely commercial considerations and reasons, apparent in the disspasionate modern glance cast back at this short false-start, when federal government and oligarchs seeded the first global conglomerates in an era immediatley pre-high capitalist mechanization, when all strands of identifible source fluxed and combined and wove the 8 year Reconstruction programme noted for it's unprecedented level of federal support, in the immediate aftermath and post-8 civil war years.


A southern minority-belt forced their wicked bible of scripturally wrong will on the union whose northern people turned a blindly complict eye to and the implementation of real freedom was dispensed with, cruelly cut down as mid-19C New World history began winding a stagnant course all supressed black citizens were forced to endure on their next hundred year walk of tortuous and non-divine tragedy.

The fair, swift first flowering and advance in emancipation was immediately pruned back and reversed as Reconstruction ended.

The Democrats sealed the effective reversing of in a series of racist legislation whose sole purpose was to remove and silence the voice of African-America, the ghost of tradgedy haunting a commercial wickedness inherently uncle Sam, yet culturally shared by all humanity.


This poem is nearly 95% Sidney Larnier's and half it's original length. I sprung his homily and poem affirming Nature;s love as the absolute, from a swaddle of commercial language at the surgery-suite of imititive word-play. I took a few - minor - shocking liberties in my choices of intervention, tweak, polish and attempt to respond.

What struck me on reading his poem in untransliterated form, is that it's conceit is semblanced upon a datum and base premise that trade-deities exist in the contemporary, modern ageless and rapid electronic mediation through time, Landier deployed as a cypher, heraldically metaphorised and wrought as his banner declaiming the selfishness carpet-bagger mentality, as a pale human con of what true potential for goodness between it's members to be more loving "as of this moment," in a know and now, tow of existence.

The "Trade" outpourings are in an inverse register to the soaring coscurant praise here, where language scrapes by the skin of it's teeth to word-capes hung to muffle and fabric the billowing release when tugged from noise-crates, one snatched flick and the billowing fabric a tongue at first sounding.

The elegiac half of Lendier acheives a level of linguistic complexity few achieve. Words slip, clip and dodge neatly into an instinctually deft neologism, straining for coinage at the foundary of poetic practice, understanding and essentially declaring Nature as the true philisophical register Lendier counterweights with basic two-tonal duality of tenor, passion and length.

The half I cut is a philisophical tirade in a confused register notable by it's absence here, against "Trade," at a time when America went to war with itself over the economic legality and place in American society of slavery, out of which the modern genus of Democrat and Republican party politics arose.

I undertook to re-fashion and exercise by moderning-out the thee, thou, o'er a flowery dell register in which petals of his verse stretch and are sprung for our inspection in the total grove of language-garden cloaked, half-swathed in an cloudy patina of a mind wrestling the morality of flesh as posession, chattel and serf, it's equitable acheivement dulled and dressed in the garb of casually magisterial rhetoric the contemporary eye may encounter resistance identifying without the prune response-reading brings.

The full force of the original inversion, dismissed, misted and hidden under a thickly accrued abeyant grammer, syntax and antiquated words misapprehended, the linguistic shift of the 150 years, aged but - with instinct - intelligence will found language strategems, cull and switch text that's true light subtely shuffling fuller rhyme to a less obvious chiming position on the line of Victorian order, acted as a polisher and co-opted langauge back into straightforward utterance.

The Wordsworthian sense of spontaeneous effulgence and dominant public spirit of Romantic, earth bound men - all of whom left the stage before verse was unshackled from the cod-Parnassus, chipped edifice of daffodil bulb, sprung in from ingnored native sources, closer to living speech of stilt-walkers self-chosen, appointed or both and a from that has recently been pimped up for his 200 anniversary.

Here I did not seek to tenor Dottie's Bro in a rap frequncy, rather tinkle at the piano of a typeface in search of inner enlightenment, by writing in shade, inhabiting by exploratative act, the work of another to see if I can trail in a slipstream of the talent far more able than my own.

At the heart of his lifetime's poetic was a musical embrocate and rational, ineluctable balance that came with the physiological making of music. When at the summit of this prodigious gift, Lanier composed a piece of music which imitaded birdsong - The Blackbird - a natural sound-scape so imitiively acurate to all external ear, it's reality brought him the total respect of an artist all within the sphere of creation recognize as the real Fionn mac Cumhaill.

Hopkins corresponding prosodic invention, he labels "inscape," the essential preposition in the metrical equation of his tantalising, unique and yet ultimately unrealised prosodic system, that gyre as lofty and out of common reach as the original Yeats and Graves' white goddess bound essentially knowable to oneself only, if at all, seeing as the central thesis seems precariously imbalanced by an abundance of ifs, buts and maybes-of-data none but one's original creator impulsing information contains a full understanding of, the mechanical semblance of human belief.

Monday, April 02, 2007

"Neither Breton nor French but from
Saint Malmo am I"

a Corsair cabin boy and captain racing
the Clarisse, fleeing the Sybille with a Lettre

de Marque and Reprisal from the Councils
of Ancients and Five Hundred I, the ship's

Master - who ditched eight guns aft
and out ran a frigate - stowed safe

on-board the Auspicious, seized with a full
merchantman and brig the hero and dealer

King Privateer, sailed into a famished Port Louis.
Millions of francs in cargo seized I, baronial

Robert the Napolean Colonel Surcouf, mortally
ruthless and physically minded, who floated

a bygone age pre and post Bonaparte First
Consul, after


"the prompt, severe, inflexible justice"


of The Terror had passed and two first among
equals in infamy and visciousness

Robespierre and Cromwell - their grievous gods
bare boned, Incorruptible and Ironside snarled
in history
slaughtered citizens comporting themselves


"enemies of liberty,"


who controlled all sou and shilling.

~


"Le citoyen non slave pour la république
suis moi"


proclaimed war-deities slaying with scottish
maidens, guillotines and grief trees


"who by their conduct, associations
comments, or writings
have shown themselves partisans
of tyranny"


and upheld order by beheading, pledging
my allegiance to Odin on his throne

of eternal thunder and light in a disordered age
of Convention and Commonwealth cause that lit

Anglo-Saxon Woden in fire-storm and ice-gale
blowing below the all-air deity, next to a fertility

god of human pleasure and peace, Freyr
the phallus his Answerer sheathed, Valkyries'

armour-sparks an Aurora Borealis, fused
through trade-routes from Carlisle

to Alexandria, drawn to tutelars of cultural
darkness and one expanding market

whose ancient coinage of flesh a runaway
blast of inflation collapsed by poetic fury

of hypoborean wind-gods and warriors
hunting an eidolon force my daemon's shade

wove in the poison-roof of serpent-spine
dripping wet venom on caitiffs wading

a river in blood beneath knife-floes tearing
past North facing doors, it's kerf-frozen slag

riming where the serf-ghost swung
in a gibbet-cage and furnaced the spirit

of suffrage for millennia, in a fiendish cant
creole and cryptolect on Law and Moot

Mount, heard at the peak of hostage mounds
where rival familial members got maimed

and princely material from the roydamma
derbfine blinded-out of contention

by unblemished kings who snatched thralls
from Hiberno-Albion slayers and wrote

"England is too pure an air for a slave
to breathe."