Humor

Capella dos Ossos

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CAPELLA DOS OSSOS
(Chapel of Bones, Evora )

They drew blood from the bull’s body, stretching him,
broken, over golden sand: a playground for the gods.
His one horn, splintered, plowed into the arena,
his other horn pointed skywards: a finger of wrath.

Cannibal red and carnival yellow, his blood and urine
spilled for the drunken pleasure for which we had paid.
We had also paid for bands and martial music; a Mexican
wave swept rhythmically over the bullring to enliven us.

Later that day we gave warm coins to the tour guide.
She counted the whites of our astonished eyes and divided
the total by two as we stepped from the air-conditioned bus.

The chapel’s slaughterhouse stench overcame us.
Bone after human bone thrust out from the ossuary walls:
a generation of tarnished hands held out to greet us.

Note:
This poem is a golden oldie, published way back when, not only in the last century, but in the last millennium, courtesy of the Nashwaak Review. Sometimes, it’s fun to explore that past and see where it led us. This is from my Milton Acorn, almost about to rhyme, Jackpine Sonnet mode. The poem does have 14 lines.

Metalanguage

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Metalanguage I

I wonder what I’m doing here, so far from home, sitting
at the bar, with my beer before me, my face distorted
in half a dozen esperpentic mirrors, surrounded by
people half my age, or less, all smoking, cursing, using
foreign forms of meta-language, gestures I no longer recall:
the single finger on the nose, two fingers on the forehead,
the back of the hand rammed against the chin with a sort
of snort of disapproval. It’s way beyond my bedtime; yet
I am held here, captured, body and soul, by foreign rhythms,
unreal expectations of a daily ritual that runs on unbroken
cycles of time: morning coffee, pre-lunch wine and tapas,
home for the mid-day meal, a brief siesta, back to the café
for a post-prandial raising of spirits, more coffee, then back
to work at four and struggle on until seven or eight when
the bar routine begins again with pre-supper tapas and wine.
Time, divorced from this cycle now lacks meaning.
Time within this cycle is meaningless too.

El Rincón
03 VIII 2005

Metalanguage II

I wonder what I’m doing here,
so far from home,
sitting at the bar, my beer before me,
my face distorted in half a dozen
fairground mirrors,
surrounded by people half my age,
or less, all smoking, cursing,
using foreign forms of meta-language,
gestures I no longer recall:
the single finger on the nose,
two fingers on the forehead,
the back of the hand rammed against the chin
with a sort of snort of disapproval.

It’s way beyond my bedtime;
yet I am held here,
captured, body and soul,
by foreign rhythms,
unreal expectations of a daily ritual
that runs on unbroken cycles of time:
morning coffee,
pre-lunch wine and tapas,
home for the mid-day meal,
a brief siesta,
back to the café for a post-prandial
raising of spirits,
more coffee,
then back to work at four
and I struggle on until seven or eight
when the bar routine begins again
with pre-supper tapas and wine.

Time,
divorced from this cycle
now lacks meaning.

Time
within this cycle
is meaningless too.

Idlewood
24 IX 2016

People Poems 3

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People Poems are dedicated to people who, for one reason or another, have distinguished themselves in my life. People Poem 3 is dedicated to Tanya Cliff who has supported me and encouraged me ever since I started this blog. Her comments on my writing have been most welcome and our on- / off-line conversations have led us in many delightful directions. More important, perhaps, in my post-cancer recovery stage: Tanya’s daily quotes from the Bible, some of them very apt [Even to your old age and gray hairs I am he, I am he who will sustain you. I have made you and I will carry you; I will sustain you and I will rescue you. (ISA 46:4, NIV)], have reminded me of a faith that I have never lost. Thank you, Tanya, for your enthusiasm, for your encouragement, for the moments we have shared, and for reminding me of the power of that faith. Please accept this poem and this bouquet of e-flowers as my tribute and acknowledgement of my debt to you.

In the Cave
Brandy Cove
Gower / Gwyr

No:
I do not understand these things.

I have had few visions;
no bush has actually burned for me.

Though I have sat in this cave for many a day
there has been no thunder, no earthquake,
and no thin, small voice has called my name.

I have only heard the wind and the waves
and the sigh of the sea-birds endlessly flying.

Who set the curlew’s cry between my lips?
Who dashed the salt taste from my tongue?

I will never forget the wet sand foaming between my toes
nor the cracked rock crumbling under my hand…

… yet I never fell,
nor was I trapped by the sea below.

Previous People Poem Award Winners include, in alphabetical order:

Meg Sorick, Pearl Kirkby …

 

 

People Poems 2

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People Poems are dedicated to people who, for one reason or another, have distinguished themselves in my life. People Poem 2 is dedicated to Pearl Kirkby who persuaded me — in one sentence — to change my signature from that of a backward looking former academic to that of a forward looking creative writer. ID, from Granite Ship rewritten as Land of Rocks and Saints, and liked by Pearl, reminds me of my time in academia. However, the final image of the USB states clearly the forward-looking aspect of my creativity. I am now a full-time creative writer. Thank you, Pearl, for pointing this out to me. Please accept this poem and this bouquet of e-flowers as my tribute and acknowledgement of my debt to you.

ID

Within this bookstore are many books, yet none
with my name on the cover or my life blood inside.
Deeper I dig, and deeper. Now here is a name I know,
and there in the bibliography, at last, I find my name:

two books, a dozen or so articles, a thesis, and I am
vindicated. All that study, that work, has led to this:
my name in a foreign book in a foreign bookstore. Nice
work: now I know that wherever I go, I can establish

my identity, set myself free from anonymity’s pangs.
Plug in the computer, turn it on, and there I am on the web,
smiling back at me. There is no better passport, no better

sense of being, of identity, than that contained in these
images of self, these self-reproductions that I carry with
me, always, in a memory stick looped round my neck.

Plaza de Santa Teresa
26 VII 2005

People Poems 1

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People Poems are dedicated to people who, for one reason or another, have distinguished themselves in my life. The first poem, People Poem 1, is dedicated to Meg Sorick who is the very first person, ever, in history, to purchase one of my books, Sun and Moon, online from Amazon. To be Welsh on Sunday pays  tribute to Meg’s adventures with Michelada, among other things! Congratulations, Meg! Many thanks, and I do hope you enjoy your new book. Meanwhile, please accept this poem and this bouquet of e-flowers as my tribute and acknowledgement of my debt to you.

To be Welsh on Sunday

(This poem should be read out loud, fast, and in a single breath!)

To be Welsh on Sunday in a dry area of Wales is to wish,
for the only time in your life, that you were English and civilized,
and that you had a car or a bike and could drive
or pedal to your heart’s desire, the county next door,
wet on Sundays, where the pubs never shut
and the bar is a paradise of elbows in your ribs
and the dark liquids flow, not warm, not cold, just right,
and family and friends are there beside you
shoulder to shoulder, with the old ones sitting
indoors by the fire in winter or outdoors in summer,
at a picnic table under the trees
or beneath an umbrella that says Seven Up and Pepsi
(though nobody drinks them) and the umbrella is a sunshade
on an evening like this when the sun is still high
and the children tumble on the grass playing
soccer and cricket and it’s “Watch your beer, Da!”
as the gymnasts vault over the family dog till it hides
beneath the table and snores and twitches until “Time,
Gentlemen, please!” and the nightmare is upon us
as the old school bell, ship’s bell, rings out its brass warning
and people leave the Travellers’ Rest, the Ffynnon Wen,
The Ty Coch, The Antelope, The Butcher’s, The Rhiwbina Deri,
The White Rose, The Con Club, the Plough and Harrow,
The Flora, The Woodville, The Pant Mawr, The Cow and Snuffers
— God Bless them all, I knew them in my prime.

On Being Welsh

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On Being Welsh

I am the all-seeing eyes at the tip of Worm’s Head;
I am the teeth of the rocks at Rhossili;
I am the blackness in Pwll Ddu pool
when the sea-swells suck the stranger
in and out, sanding his bones.

Song pulled taut from a dark Welsh lung,
I am the memories of Silure and beast
mingled in a Gower Cave;
tamer of aurox,
hunter of deer,
caretaker of coracle
fisher of salmon on the Abertawe tide,
I am the weaver of rhinoceros wool.

I am the minority,
persecuted for my faith,
for my language, for my sex,
for the coal-dark of my thoughts;

I am the bard whose harp,
strung like a bow,
will sing your death
with music of arrows
from the wet Welsh woods;

I am the barb that sticks in your throat
from the dark worded ambush of my song.

Ownership: Whose poem is it anyway?

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Whose poem is it?
Fictional Friends
Saturday, 17 September 2016

Ana, Anna, BettyAnne,
David, Jane, Lachlan, Margaret, Neil,
Roger

            I spent a happy two hours on Saturday afternoon in a literary workshop with a group of Fictional Friends. We were work-shopping a colleague’s story. It had been circulated to us the week before and we had all had a chance to read it and offer our responses. The author joined in the discussion quite freely and the conversation was in depth and very pointed.

Without giving away any intimate details, I believe that the general points that arose in the discussion are well worth opening up to a wider audience. I will leave them in question form.

1. The narrative voice: Is it stronger than the voice of the characters and should it be? To what extent should the narrator dominate the story? Should the characters have pride of place? How do we seek and find a balance between narrator and characters, especially when the author’s own voice, in real life and literature, can be so strong?

2. The focal point: What is the focal point of the story? Should it have a single focus, a single slug line, a sentence that can sum it up? Is it about the conflict between two characters in a dysfunctional marriage? Is it about a tit-for-tat relationship with secrecy and revenge at the heart of it? How should the story be focused so the spotlight falls on one of these elements or highlights the potential conflict among all three?

3. The characters: Is the narrator a third character? Are the two main characters evenly balanced? Do they have to be likeable? Are they likeable? Can they be strengthened? If they are not likeable, can their unlike-ability be softened in any way so the reader draws closer to them? Can the points of conflict between them be sharpened or focused more clearly? Should the story be lengthened to include more background detail? Should it be shortened and made more incisive? Are there non sequiturs, false trails, red herrings that can be eliminated?

4. Dialog: Is the dialog genuine and believable? Do people really speak like this? Is the couple communicating or are they merely talking at each other without listening? Is their lack of communication, via the dialog, a key component of the story? Can this lack of communication be strengthened? Is their language unique to them, each of them? Are the ‘he said’ / ‘she said’ necessary when there are only two characters? If their speech and points of view are distinctive then dialogic pointers are not necessary, surely? All ‘saidisms’ should be removed, ‘she squeaked, he sighed’, shouldn’t they? Such ‘saidisms’ can be paraphrased within the text, can’t they?

5. Punctuation: Does the punctuation need a copy editor to sort it out? Does the punctuation enhance the meaning or confuse the reader? Do the traditional forms of punctuation hold good in the age of texting and twitter and tweet? Surely the punctuation should be standardized, possibly for the narrator and the two main characters? Standardized, perhaps, but according to whose rules? Or does the narrative create its own rules?

6. Dramatic Irony: How much does each character know? How much should the reader know? How do we let vital information become available to the reader while keeping it secret from the other characters? Do we achieve this via dialog? How do the various narrators work in this context omniscient, narrator as character, narrator with partial knowledge etc?

Two writing tips:

1. Stay in the mood: We work hard as authors to create a mood for our characters and our readers. Once we have created that mood, we must stay in it. Anything that breaks the audience’s attention must be avoided: punctuation mistakes, spelling mistakes, authorial intervention, ‘saidisms’, sudden changes in character, words that are obtrusive … avoid too, those little jokes that we love so much, especially if they do not contribute to the story  … they distract the audience from what’s happening … avoid our favorite repeated phrases … non-essentials must be left out … get in the mood … stay in the mood.

2. Read your work aloud: This is one of the best ways of concentrating on what you are writing. Two techniques: (1) record your work, close your eyes, play it back and really listen to it, perhaps more than once. This allows you to focus on rhythm, structure, and movement. (2) Read your work aloud as you are writing and after you have written. For me, in poetry, this includes the finger-tapping, syllable counting, rhythmic mode — a sílabas contadas, as Fray Luis de León, one of Spain’s most rhythmic writers, used to say.

At the end of the session, the author responded to the commentaries and then invited each of the work-shoppers to offer a condensed suggestion in a line or two. My own went like this: “You have heard thirty-five to forty different suggestions. You are the author, only you. You most focus clearly on your story and choose those recommendations that suit you best and move your story forward in the way that you want.”

Waking in the early hours of the night to converse with the Harvest moon that still drifted through the night sky, the following very different thoughts came to me. They come from my long-term experiences with work-shopping, schools of creative writing, and editors who decide what parts of an author’s work they will publish, and then ONLY with appropriate and editor-approved changes.

Whose poem is it anyway?
When we workshop a poem or a short story and
when we receive all this feedback,
what is our role?
Is the poem or the story still ours?
Whose story is it?

  1. Editors.

            My first editors insisted on re-writing my texts. They wanted me to say and write things this way, not that way. “Here’s your poem,” one wrote back. “Resubmit it like this and I’ll publish it.” It wasn’t the way I wanted it, but I did what he said and my poem was published. House editorial style: same thing. Whose poem is it? Mine, because it bears my name … but did I want it written that way? Good question.

2. El Poeta-Pueblo.

I have mentioned this concept before. It comes from Ramón Menéndez Pidal who suggested that in the best oral tradition Medieval and Renaissance Spanish poetry passed through the mouths of a series of anonymous polishers who chose the best verses and strengthened them as they went along. If the poet is the people, whose poem is it? I think of soccer chants, bumper stickers, certain repeated jokes, especially old jokes that are recycled again and again with merely a change of victim. So much is in the air, so much is heard, over-heard, half-heard … where does creativity start and where does it end?

3. Originality, Copyright, and the Right to Copy.

Some of the thoughts expressed above question the meaning of ownership, originality, creativity, and copyright. How original are we? Who actually creates the ideas in the film based on the book based on the idea based on the suggestion of the anonymous voice overheard on the commuter train? When we work in a workshop, to whom does the end result belong? When we work in a creative writing program with tutors and commentators and a thesis director who rewrites, corrects, and approves the final product, whose work is it? When we work in a team, is it the final voice that determines the final structure of the entity, that is the creator and bears the label of creativity? By extension, to what extent do we have the right to listen in, to copy, to borrow, to re-create? Is a re-creator a creator and to what extent does the re-creator really create?

Just some thoughts to share with my fictional and other friends for the joy of creation never ends — and yes, we have the right to copy (with acknowledgement), to borrow (with a tribute), to change, and shuffle, and cut … for me it’s all a form of creativity. If our friends and writing groups want to join in and help us write, then why shouldn’t they? But never forget the role of el pueblo-poeta and don’t forget to ask: whose poem is it?

Teddy Bears FFF

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Teddy Bears
Friday Fast Fiction

Now they sleep in separate rooms in single beds each tucked in with a monogrammed teddy bear.
He likes to cuddle his, keeping it warm, tucking it carefully under the bedclothes. He calls it Ready Teddy, and his favorite game, especially in summer, is to hold his teddy bear by one back leg and say in a loud voice “Ready, Teddy, GO!”
At the word “GO” he hurls his teddy bear skywards and takes great delight in the fate of a sleeping fly, pinned against the ceiling and squashed. His delight doubles if one of the pointed waves of ceiling paint impales the fly and leaves it squirming there, buzzing impotently. This means target practice and he hurls Ready Teddy, “GO, GO,” skywards again and again until the unfortunate fly, falling like a condemned angel, tumbles back to earth.
She still follows the same ritual as when they were sleeping together in the same bed. First she pummels the pillows, fluffing them up with sideways movements of the hands. Next, she lays them on the bed and beats them flat. Then she picks them up and plays them like a concertina, pushing them together then stretching them out again. As for her teddy bear, she likes to discipline it, to beat it into shape. Once upon a time, it made noises and let out little squeals and squeaks, but the constant violence has silenced its sound box.
When they slept together she often took her teddy and beat it against her husband’s head. He would wake from the deepest dream head a-throb, ears and cheeks stinging, as she flailed him with her teddy and struck him blow after blow. When his headaches grew worse, they decided to sleep apart. He felt it was better and safer that way.
Last night, she sleepwalked into his room, and sat on the side of his bed. She clasped her teddy by the feet, a rabid Rottweiler with a rag doll, and thumped her teddy’s head against her husband’s face again and again.
The sleeping tablets had made him drowsy and slow to wake. His wife kept up the barrage until he finally woke, eased the teddy bear from her grasp, and walked her back to bed
On the way back to his own room, he checked into the bathroom and examined his face in the mirror. Blood seeped from his nostrils. He had bruises under his left eye and his cheeks glowed red where veins had broken near the surface
Next morning, he sat at the breakfast table, his grandfather’s First World War magnifying mirror in his hand, and examined his face. The ice pack had taken effect and he looked less damaged now. He reached for the color correction cream in the packet beside him and read the directions with care. Then he placed a tiny drop of the magic serum onto the paintbrush and worked the correction cream over the marks on his face. He watched them disappear one by one. Now he would be ready to face the world.
He stared into the magnifying mirror gazing deeply into his own eyes. Was that how it had happened? Or had their first child really fallen downstairs, banging her little head on each wooden step at eighteen months old?
The inquest had been inconclusive, his wife held blameless. They had remained childless after the trial.
Was that a blessing or a curse?

Imitation and Creation: Wednesday Workshop

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Imitation and Creation Wednesday Workshop

 Martes y trece, mal día / Tuesday the 13th, bad day.

Imitation:

In our age of instant and spontaneous creativity, imitation is almost always bad. And yet, as John pointed out to me on Tuesday evening at our weekly meeting, imitation is the best form of flattery. We flatter other writers when we borrow from them and imitate their styles. I don’t mean wholesale plundering and plagiarism, but a nod here and there surely does no harm.

We also discussed the idea of imitatio / imitation, in ancient and medieval (and later) rhetorical texts.

Imitatio: the ideal of the good man, of the blessed spot, of the Golden Age — in rhetoric not all imitation is bad. Moreover, imitation can be doubly good when the “remake” is more original than, and betters, the original production.

Orality

From imitation we moved to orality: how much do we see and hear and overhear and then repeat? And, by extension, how accurately do we repeat what we hear?

If we go back to Roman times, the marching songs of the Imperium spread throughout the Roman Empire (Holy or not), and catchy songs, tunes, and words they were with thousands marching to them and singing them in taverns and on the road.

Think the Re-conquest of Spain (la Reconquista) and the romances noticieros, the news ballads, songs that circulated orally and were transmitted throughout the Iberian Peninsula. It is hard to imagine a society with little writing, no newspapers, no radio, no television, and everything transmitted by foot, horseback, and word of mouth. Yet that describes the situation in Spain in the 14th and 15th centuries. News was sung, and imitated, and circulated by song and word of mouth.

Ramón Menéndez Pidal coined the phrase el poeta pueblo / the poet as people, a concept that suggested an anonymous series of authors and contributors, many nameless, speaking and revising, remembering and re-polishing, verses and songs. This leads to a true oral authenticity of authorship where everyone joins in to create and re-create and we end up with a literary process of natural selection (oh yes, we discussed Darwin, and Wilberforce, and Huxley, and Mendel, and Marx, and many other things and people as well, we don’t do things by halves on Tuesday nights).

Think now of the literate, those who had letters and could write and read, and the illiterate, those who could neither read nor print their names. For us, the illiterate come down to us as crosses or ticks or thumbprints in history or as a stonemason’s mark on a cathedral, perhaps. But nevertheless, the illiterate heard, they memorized, they repeated, and they spoke. And no, in spite of all our assumptions, they were NOT stupid.

Think Napoleonic Wars and the songs that were sung on board ship in the various navies and don’t forget the marching armies. Many of these songs, words changed, are still with us. The words change, the tunes change, the rhythms change, but so many, oh so many, are recognizable when we go to their roots and examine them.

Orality and Literacy

Now think of a society in which some people can read and some can’t. Cervantes presents us with a world in which the literate and the illiterate mingle in a changing society. He shows us how they interact in his novel Don Quixote. The closest we can come today is to a world in which some are computer literate and some aren’t; some can text and some can’t; some are totally at home in social media, and some aren’t. Often this is a case of education and money. It can also be a question of privilege. But wealth and circumstance enter into the equation as well.

Now think of how this world of ours is expanding exponentially with its many forms of instant media and also how it is contracting exponentially as it becomes, in the words of the Spanish, a pocket handkerchief / el mundo es un pañuelo.

Originality

Into this mixture we must now throw originality: how creative are we? How original are we? What does it mean to be original, to be creative? I was always horrified when I heard students and professors repeating the “best” adverts they had heard on television the night before. Alas, I can still sing many of the early ads I heard on black and white television in the fifties. How much room is there in the human brain? How original is the mind that regurgitates the tv ads of so long ago and how, just how, do we incorporate them into our own version of creativity? Is creativity then warped tradition and reconditioned memory? Then think jokes, re-cycled jokes, with an ever -changing victim subjected to a never changing punchline: I don’t want to go there.

Let us think Atlantic Canada: how do we deal with Milton Acorn’s Jackpine Sonnets? Are they failed sonnets with fewer lines and falsified rhymes and rhythms? Or are they true poetic creations that reflect the True North Strong and Free that is the Jack Pine growing frivolous and free in Atlantic Canada? I will never forget my first encounter with Milton Acorn. He borrowed my photocopier code and photocopied himself, literally, on the department photocopier, limb by limb. Now is that original or not? I still remember him carrying his photocopied features across campus …

Imitation and Creation, from my computer, our Wednesday Workshop, a day late … so Euro-Centric, for that is my background, and I do apologize. For I am well aware of the influence of the tales that spread from China and India and the Arabian Peninsula into Greece and then Rome and then places further west. A small world ours, a veritable handkerchief, a literary handkerchief with repercussions across time and space, repercussions that have breadth and depth and that may come to us in so many different ways.

Imitation? Originality? Creativity? Talk to us about them, next Tuesday, at our regular weekly meeting.

 

Old Man from Tlacochahuaya

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Old Man from Tlacochahuaya

His skin
is heavy and thick:
the leathery pelt
of a working animal.

His bare feet
poke from the scratchy
leather of rough-hewn,
home-made sandals
carved from auto tires.

His toenails are iron claws
gripping the earth:
a climber’s spikes.

When I examine them
they seem cut off from the man
as if they protruded
from a bestial hoof.

I imagine him horned,
tailed, and bearded,
leaping in a bright red
devil’s suit
through black smoke
and orange flames.

Water is the bond
that binds the earth’s poor,
so I offer him
water from my bottle.

Then I see him sparkle
and his eyes are as clear
as the water he drinks
from the bottle I gift him.

Brothers across
artificial frontiers
we shake hands,
and now we are one.

Watered,
he is my friend,
my true amigo.

“Where are you going next?” I ask.

“Nowhere,”
he shrugs.

“I am just happy to be here,
squatting in this line of shade
that protects me from the fierce
knife-blade of the sun.”