Pirate Xmas: A Song

Here’s a bit of doggeral for singing:
"Pirate Xmas" --  

Ran out of Irish --
Drinking rum --
Pirate Xmas

Futility feeds into despair
Lack of hope fills that empty chair
Friends and family in disarray
Dead, distant,
Dreadfully dismayed
Under sentence
Ducking attack
Don’t count the blessings that we lack
Don’t count the blessings in arrears
Just bless, just bless
Find the needy and just bless
Pirate Xmas

Look beyond
Look beyond
Feed whom you can
Toast the rest
Pirate Xmas

Ran out of Irish –
Drinking rum –
Pirate Xmas

X marks the spot . . . .

--MD

I expect to revise this one, but the tune's in my head.
Feel free to sing as you wish.

Field of Clay

The Winding and Unwinding

THE WINDING AND UNWINDING

The shape of your thought
Entices me
Quite as much as
The thought of your shape.

Clay-minded,
Bloody-brained,
Fickle as a stick in water:
I swim towards you.

I reach for you
Again and again and again
In thought, in force,
Not withholding aught
Save what wyrd demands
From each of us.

The winding and unwinding
Of time and tide,
Again releasing,
Again embracing,
Tasting and chasing,
Like river-otters sliding
Down the sloped bank.

The winding and unwinding
Of time and tide:
The rounded lift and heft,
The nipple’s assertion,
The twinned-blood rising
Like the swift pull
Of the river’s pulse
And penetration --
Flowing,
Falling,
Following –-

That shared current
Streaming just past the shore,
Stranding us between
Just enough
And quite enough.
___

Coda:
Laughing lips sip --
Swallow -- another draft.
Glasses, glances,
Clash and chime,
Toasting the new year.

Harken to the hearty
Admonition:
Draft, not drift.

--Matthew Duckworth

Draft

Clay-minded,
Bloody-brained,
Fickle as a stick in water --

--MD

Take Note (Take Two)

TAKE NOTE

We are the grit
That mars the paint
Or makes the pearl.

"Fiery dust,"
Lord Byron wrote,
Illustrious, notorious,
Untrammeled by our common clay,
And utterly undismayed.

Be equally furious,
Be equally industrious:
Take full note --
And write.

MD

Just revised: 12/18/15.

HWAET!

Lead figurines from the 1970s:
orc-warrior
vs. Spear-Dane.

Hurly-Burly: Poetry in Motion

This was a last-day hurly-burly of What-Poetry-Can-Be-And-Do and How-You-Can-Enjoy-The-Ride. Some of the following works were treated fully, but the others received glancing treatment, mere introductions or excerpts or highlighted singular effects: sacrifices on the altars of poetic efficacy and exuberant aesthetic trail-guiding.  Voice and story, voice and story.  What and how, what and how.

Hughes' "Suicide's Note"
        (body of the poem first, then the title revealed);
Auden's "The Shield of Achilles"
        (for we've read The Iliad this term);
Grimm's "Hansel and Gretel" paraphrased to set up
Gluck's "Gretel in Darkness"
       (trauma and serious poetic conversations);
two quotations matched and set
       from Auden's "September 1, 1939"
       and Shelley's "Julian and Maddalo"
             (mere bits in parallel and contradiction);
a foray into Jackie Leven's lyrics
       from "Classic Northern Diversions"
(to read mood even if you don't know what the song is about, to find signs);
close-reading exercises
       with Frost's "Stopping By The Woods on a Snowy Evening"
       and Wyatt's "They Flee from Me That Sometime Did Me Seek"
       and Keats' "When I have fears that I may cease to be";
then, Frost's apocalyptic "Fire and Ice";
Spenser's logical/romantic playing with "My Love is Like to Ice, and I to Fire";
Donne's twisty-fun "Woman's Inconstancy";
a quick look at Dante Gabriel Rossetti's artwork to set up
       Christina Rossetti's beautiful and incisive "In An Artist's Studio";
and finally Herrick's playful "Cherry-ripe" -----------

(I had some Elvis Costello one-liners for flavor and effect in my back pocket, but I ended up not having time to use them appropriately and so held back.)

a very full 75-minute class.

Oh, I also quoted with context that venerable bumper sticker "Question Authority" and that mug I saw at Pegasus On Solano with "Birds have wings / Humans have books".

Burton Raffel's How To Read A Poem -- along with a slew of handouts -- was the textbook at hand.

Clamshells in Clay

Clamshells & pearls:

soldate clay;

matte blue glazing.

Byron: "An Erring Spirit From Another Hurled"

Here’s a passage from Lord Byron’s “Lara”, that sequel to “The Corsair”, in which the Miltonic basis of that literary paradigm ‘The Byronic Hero’ can be seen in the first lines of Part 18.  I think we hear a little Pope, Johnson, and Shakespeare in the passage too, but shaken and twisted in that English Romantic hurlyburly of a soul.    Or, that’s what I think.

Here’s the passage, Parts 17 and 18 from Canto I of “Lara”, borrowed from the Project Gutenberg edition:


XVII.
In him inexplicably mixed appeared
Much to be loved and hated, sought and feared;
Opinion varying o'er his hidden lot,
In praise or railing ne'er his name forgot:
His silence formed a theme for others' prate—
They guessed—they gazed—they fain would know his fate.
What had he been? what was he, thus unknown,
Who walked their world, his lineage only known?
A hater of his kind? yet some would say,
With them he could seem gay amidst the gay;
But owned that smile, if oft observed and near,
Waned in its mirth, and withered to a sneer;
That smile might reach his lip, but passed not by,
Nor e'er could trace its laughter to his eye:
Yet there was softness too in his regard,
At times, a heart as not by nature hard,
But once perceived, his Spirit seemed to chide
Such weakness, as unworthy of its pride,
And steeled itself, as scorning to redeem
One doubt from others' half withheld esteem;
In self-inflicted penance of a breast
Which Tenderness might once have wrung from Rest;
In vigilance of Grief that would compel
The soul to hate for having loved too well.

XVIII.
There was in him a vital scorn of all:
As if the worst had fallen which could befall,
He stood a stranger in this breathing world,
An erring Spirit from another hurled;
A thing of dark imaginings, that shaped
By choice the perils he by chance escaped;
But 'scaped in vain, for in their memory yet
His mind would half exult and half regret:
With more capacity for love than Earth
Bestows on most of mortal mould and birth.
His early dreams of good outstripped the truth,
And troubled Manhood followed baffled Youth;
With thought of years in phantom chase misspent,
And wasted powers for better purpose lent;
And fiery passions that had poured their wrath
In hurried desolation o'er his path,
And left the better feelings all at strife
In wild reflection o'er his stormy life;
But haughty still, and loth himself to blame,
He called on Nature's self to share the shame,
And charged all faults upon the fleshly form
She gave to clog the soul, and feast the worm:
Till he at last confounded good and ill,
And half mistook for fate the acts of will:
Too high for common selfishness, he could
At times resign his own for others' good,
But not in pity—not because he ought,
But in some strange perversity of thought,
That swayed him onward with a secret pride
To do what few or none would do beside;
And this same impulse would, in tempting time,
Mislead his spirit equally to crime;
So much he soared beyond, or sunk beneath,
The men with whom he felt condemned to breathe,
And longed by good or ill to separate
Himself from all who shared his mortal state;
His mind abhorring this had fixed her throne
Far from the world, in regions of her own:
Thus coldly passing all that passed below,
His blood in temperate seeming now would flow:
Ah! happier if it ne'er with guilt had glowed,
But ever in that icy smoothness flowed!
'Tis true, with other men their path he walked,
And like the rest in seeming did and talked,
Nor outraged Reason's rules by flaw nor start,
His Madness was not of the head, but heart;
And rarely wandered in his speech, or drew
His thoughts so forth as to offend the view.