It has kind of become traditional of me, on this blog to mark St David's Day (Dydd Gwyl Dewi) somehow. Today I offer you a poem by one of our foremost women contemporary poets. She is considered to be one of our greatest living poets, and is currently our national poet.Born in Cardiff, her work is rooted in our landscape, having lived and worked in Wales for most of her life.Since the 1980s she has resided here in rural Ceredigion . I like what she writes a lot and find her poems display her mastery of language with all its lucidity and power.
This one comes from her Collected Poems (Carcanet Press, 2008). Here she makes a personal recollection, a true story after she was invited to read poetry to patients in the Occupational Therapy Department of a mental hospital in South Wales, organised to celebrate St Davids Day. The contrast between her opening quote and the rest of the poem, draws you in. Hers is set amongst enclosed walls, that are often closed to the outside world,that many people are unable to witness unless they have been unfortunate to have spent some time waiting for miracles, diving for stones,an almost invisible world that Gillian Clarke brings to life, providing a rare glimpse of an often private hidden world, while the Wordsworth (the opening quote) poem which she returns to, looks outside for inspiration. I think it has much power and depth, and I find it very moving. I hope you enjoy. Miracle on St David's Day
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude
- The Daffodils - William Worsworth
An afternoon yellow and open-mouthed
with daffodils. The sun treads the path
among cedars and enormous oaks.
It might be a country house, guests strolling,
the rumps of gardeners between nursery shrubs.
I am reading poetry to the insane.
An old woman, interrupting, offers
as many buckets of coals as I need.
A beautiful chestnut-haired boy listens
entirely absorbed. A schizophrenic
on a good day, they tell me later.
In a cage of first March sun a woman
sits not listening, not seeing, not feeling.
In her neat clothes, the woman is absent.
A big mild man is tenderly led
to his chair. He has never spoken.
His labourer's hands of his knees, he rocks
gently to the rhythyms of the poems.
I read to their prescences, absences,
to the big, dumb labouring man as he rocks.
He is suddenly standing, silently,
huge and mild, but I feel afraid. Like slow
movement of spring water or the first bird
of the year in the breaking darkness,
the labourer's voice recites The Daffodils'.
The nurses are frozen, alert; the patients
seem to listen. He is hoarse but word-perfect.
Outside the daffodils are still as wax,
a thousand, ten thousand, their syllables
unspoken, their creams and yellows still.
Forty years ago, in a Valleys school,
the class recited poetry by rote.
Since the dumbness of misery fell
he has remembered there was a music
of speech and that once he had something to say.
When he's done, before the applause, we observe
the flowers' silence. A thrush sings
and the daffodils are aflame.
Reprinted from :- Gillian Clarke:Collected Poems Carcanet 1997 Originally from 'Letter from a far Country; 1982
'Donate a Poem for Freedom' is a fundraising campaign for Freedom Bookshop after the firebombing 1/2/13. If you are a poet/know a poet who would like to contribute, here is a link to the facebook page. https://www.facebook.com/DonateAPoemForFreedom
The collection will be published via LULU and proceeds will go to Freedom Bookshop.
Submission topics: freedom, liberty,oppression free speech.
Deadline: 1st March
The following is one of my own contributions.
Hungry for Freedom
So long as a human being thirsts for freedom and is shackled in a concrete cage without charge under a policy universally condemned called administrative detention I will sound alarms.
and if my poetry drifts towards polemic I will make no apology with the absence of the unseen in mainstream news I will spread their dreams and hopes.
So long as bulldozers destroy peoples homes and walls are built that divide and uproot I will raise my voice.
and when peoples lands are stolen daily from under their feet I will not be cowed into silence.
When rules of law are twisted that allow voices to be unheard I will not feign blindness pretend ignorance I will try to be an echoe.
and if some are allowed to steal the richness from peoples souls I will stand up and stamp my feet.
and will proudly raise my fist proudly raise my fist.
Lawrence Ferlinghetti I consider to be one of my favorite poets, a legend who in 1953, founded the City Lights bookstore.A prominent voice of the wide-open poetry movement that began in the 1950s, he has written poetry, translation, fiction, theater, art criticism, film narration and essays. Often concerned with politics and social issues. His work countered the literary elites definition of art and the artists role in the world. Though imbued with the commonplace, his poetry cannot be simply described as polemic or personal protest, for it stands on his craftmanship, thematics and grounding in tradition. Born in Yonkers, New York in 1919 , an activist whose beats still goes on, still brave enough and daring to challenge peoples beliefs, a painter too, but still active as a poet 90 plus years young. His life has seen him act as a catalyst for numerous literary careers and for the Beat movement itself, publishing the eaerly work of Allen Ginsberg, Kerouac and Gary Snyder.
Making poetry accessible to all, with his lucid views he has long watered my senses. His bookstore quickly became an iconic literary institution that has embodied social change and literary freedom. A truly remarkable person, and a great inspiration.
What follows is what I would regard as his tour de force,although a work in progress, it is a a fine poetic manifesto nontheless, that proves he's still got the edge, still got the force.His innovative poetics incorporate slang, pop cultural references wry humour to examine the human condition. Here he shows us his purpose, I guess its up to us to do it ourselves.
I am signalling you through the flames.
The North Pole is not where it used to be.
Manifest Destiny is no longer manifest.
Civilisation self-destructs.
Nemesis is knocking at the door.
What are poets for, in such an age? What is the use of poetry?
The state of the world calls out for poetry to save it.
If you would be a poet, create works capable of answering the challenge of apocalyptic times, even if this meaning sounds apocalyptic.
You are Whitman, you are Poe, you are Mark Twain, you are Emily Dickinson and Edna St. Vincent Millay, you are Neruda and Mayakovsky and Pasolini, you are an American or an non-American, you can conquer the conquerer with words.
If you would be a poet, write living newspapers. Be a reporter from outer space, filing dispatches to some supreme managing editor who believes in full disclosure, and has a low tolerance for bullshit.
If you would be a poet, experiment with all manner of poetic, erotic broken grammers, ecstatc religions, heathen outpourings speaking in tongues, bombast public speech, automatic scribblings, surrealist sensings, streams of consiousness, found sounds, rants and raves- to create your own limbie, your own underlying, your ur voice.
If you call yourself a poet, don't just sit there. Poetry is not a sedentary occupation, not a "take your seat" practice. Stand up and let them have it.
If you would be a poet, invent a new language, anyone could understand. If you would be a poet, speak new truths that the world can't deny.
Through art, create order out of the chaos of the living.
Make it new news.
Write beyond time.
Reinvent the idea of beauty.
Question everything and everyone, including Socrates who questioned everything.
Be subversive, constantly questioning reality and the status quo.
Strive to change the world in such a way that there's no further need to be a dissident.
Hip Hop and Rap your way to liberation.
Your poems must be more than want adds for broken hearts.
Words can save you where guns can't.
Give a voice to the tongueless street.
See the rose through world-clored glasses.
Be an eye among the blind.
Be naive, non-cynical, as if you had just landed on earth, astonshed by what tou have fallen upon.
Dig folk singers who are the true singing poets of yesterday and today.
Think subjectively, write objectively.
Like a field of sunflowers, a poem should not have to be explained.
Haunt bookstores.
Cultivate dissidence and critical thinking. First though may be worst thought.
Sow your poems with the salt of the earth.
Don't ever believe poetry is irrelevant in dark times.
Make new wine out of the grapes of wrath.
Be the gadfly of the state and also its firefly.
Poetry is making something out of nothing, and can be about nothing and still mean something.
from Poetry as Insurgent Art New Directions Press 2007
This weekend marks Bradley Manning's 100th day in captivity without charge.
This track is by Cor Cochion Caerdydd a Welsh Campagn group who work timelessly to raise awareness about world injusstices and illegal acts of war, which we have been witnesses to in recent years.
Profits from the sale of this single go towards the legal defence case of this heroic Welsh America, and thereafrter to the international peace movent via C.N.D Cymru.
Blowing whistes on war crimes is not a crime. While criminal bankers enjoy immunity because 'they are big to fail,' Bradley Manning faces life for exposing the truth.
Thia video was made in the land of the Gadigal people of the Eora nation, whose sovreignty never ceded.
The video was made by the following BDS supporters
Camera: Fabio Cavadini
Lightning and Sound: Amanda King
Music (oud and daf): Mohamed Youssef
Music recordist: Richie Belkner
Music composer: Osloob of Katibeh 5
Video editor: Adrian Warburton
Produced by: Rihab Charida and Aamer Rahman
Thanks to Salwa El-Shaikh, Jason De Santolo, Stephen Dobson, Fred Deveson, Sally Osborne and Theo Fatseas.
Video in order of appearance:
Mutulu "M1" Olugbala
Peter Manning
Milan Ring
Lowkey (Kareem Denis)
Tuva El-Shaikh
Kerrie McGrath
Fatima Mawas
Awate Suleiman
Anthony Loewenstein
Anika Moeen
Asmer Rahman
Currently consumer confidence has plunged as a result of the horsemeat scandal and supermarkets are desperately trying to reassure shoppers that the food we buy is safe and correctly labelled.
But mislabelling in supermarkets is actually a wider issue- and in the case of produce from illegal Israeli settlements it has been systematic and long standing.
All Israeli settlements in the occupied Palestinian territories are illegal under international law. Many shoppers who wish to buy ethically avoid buying from suppliers who profit from the crimes of occupation. To do that you need to know where the food you buy is coming from. Recently their have been thousands of emails sent to supermarket CEOs calling on them to follow the Co-operative's lead in implementing an ethical sourcing policy, and not using companies which deal in produce from the settlements.
Their is a broad consensus among Palestinian civil society, about thhe need for a wide and sustained Campaign for Boycott, Disvestment and Sanctions. These kind of actions are effective economic, political and cultural expressions of action, with many people joining this call. As a means of expessing their dissatisfaction with Israels apartheid policies.
More infomation on this subject can be found below
Quintillian was a Roman writer on rhetoric, and during the reign of the Emporor Domitian he was charged with the education of the Emporor's two great-nephews. It is with their training in eloquence that Quintillian concerns himseld in his Institutio Oratoria - the most thorough treastment of an orator's education in classical literature. Here Quinttilian deals with how the orator may make the best use of falsehood. Politicians take note.
' Sometimes, too, we get a false statement of facts; these, as far as actual pleading is concerned, fall into two classes. In the first case the statement depends on external support; Publius Clodius, for instance, relied on his witnesses, when he stated that he was at Interamna on the nght when he committed abominable sacrilege at Rome. The other has to be supported by the speaker's native talent, and sometimes consists simply in an assumption of modesty, which is, I imagine, the reasonwhy it is called a gloss, while at other times it will be concerned with the question at issue. Whichever of these two forms we employ, we must take care, first that our fiction is within the bounds of possibility, secondly that it is consistent with the persons, data and places involved, and thirdly that it presents a character and a sequence that are not beyond belief: if possible, it should be connected with something that is admttedly true and should be supported by some argument that forms part of the actual case. For if we draw our fictions entirely from circumstances lying outside the case, the liberty which we have taken in resorting to falsehood will stand revealed. Above all we must see that we do not contradict ourselves, a slip which is far from rare on the part of spinners of fiction; for some things may put a more favourable complexion on portions of our case, and yet fail to agree as a whole. Further, what we say must not be at variance with the admitted truth. Even in the schools, if we desire a gloss, we must not look for it outside the facts laid down by our theme. In either case the orator should bear clearly in mind throughout his whole speech what the fiction is to which he has committed himself, since we are apt to forget our falsehoods, and there is no doubt about the truth of the proverb that a liar should have a good memory. But whereas, if the question turns on some act of our own, we must make one statement and stick to it, if it turns on an act committed by others, we may cast suspicion on a number of different points. In certain controversial themes of the schools, however, in which it is to be assumed that we have put a question and recieved no reply, we are at liberty to enumerate all the possible answers that might have been given. But we must remember only to invent such things as cannot be checked by evidence: I refer to occasions when we make our own minds speak (and we are the only persons who are in their secret) or put words in the mouth of the dead (for what they say is not liable to contradiction) or again in the mouth of someone whose interests are identical with our (for he will not contradict), or finally in the mouth of our opponent (for he will no be believed if he does not deny).'
Quintillian, The Institute, trans. H.E. Butler, Heinemann, 1921
Unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs), better known as drones, have crept into modern warfare as quietly as the airborne killing machines themselves and on the whole, media reporting on them has been just as subdued.
Last week, the veil of silence was finally lifted when two of the most important and influential newspapers in the United States - the New York Times and the Washington Post - ran stories on a secret airbase in Saudi Arabia from which the US military has operated its 'drone war' campaign over Afghanistan, Pakistan and Yemen for the past two years.
However, as the story broke, it also came to light that reporters at both newspapers had known about the base long before the story went to print. They had agreed to conceal newsworthy infomation at the request of the US intelligence establishment, on the basis that reporting the truth would have harmed American national security interests.
The complicity of journalist with government officials to keep the base a secret has been justified on grounds of national security but the issue has raised troubling questions of when military secrets- as defined by the government - pull rank on the public duty of the fourth estate to inform.
-
trouble, trouble,boils and bubbles
with the bedroom tax, a storm is brewing
as the government makes their friends rich,
while making the rest of us poor,
with their voices of capital drown our song.
Time for some love making, time to keep warm,
feel the touch and comfort of raptures arms,
taste and feel the anchor of love,
that makes their power redundant,
in acts of unconditional embrace.
Surrender to gentle heartbeat,
that simultaneously melt and mend,
in the morning awake,
paint the days with passion,
follow ports of possibility.
We wake make buds,
then petals, then leafs.
outside darkness drives
in the other direction,
we struggle on,
connecting others.
hand on hand
shoulder to shoulder,
draw breath, reach out
resusicate hungry mouths,
ah, it's a beautiful feeling
this thing called love.
Samer Issawi is currently living his last hours inside an Israeli prision hospital after over 200 days on an open-ended hunger strike demanding justice and his freedom since July 29th 2012. Being illegally detained without charges or given a fair trial since July 2th 2012. He is still placed in solitary confinement.
There have been many more Palestinian hunger strikers before him; Khader Adnan, Hana Shabi and Mahmoud Sarsak.
They have gone on hunger strike to allow their voices to be heard. Protesting against the inhumane conditions that they live in. Using nonviolent means to express their plights. In 1943 their was Ghandi and in the 1980s their were the Irish hunger strikers, which at the time got a lot of attention in the world wide news and drew a lot of support, but today the international media is ignoring the plight of the Palestinian hunger striker.
Back in October 2011, Issawi was released as part of the Shalit prisoners exchange deal, and they were told their would be no restriction on their movement, however eight months after his release, Issawi was re-arrested in Hizma. Israel claimed that he had broke the terms of his release by leaving Jerusalem, yet Israels own maps show that Hizma is within the borders of the municipility of Jerusalem. Proving that Israel never abides by any agreement or treaty and ignores all international laws. This has happened to many other Palestinians released under the prisoner exchange agreements.
Samer's life now hangs in a thread, back in December 24th he released a short message via his lawyers ' My detention is unjust and illegal, just like the occupation is. My demands are legitimate and just. Thus I will not withdraw from the battle for freedom, waiting for either victory and freedom - or martyrdom.'
His condition is now critical, having lost more than 80lbs of weight, vision worsening day by day, continuous diarrhea, acute B12 vitamin deficiency,excruciating pain , vomiting blood, with great difficuly breathing, but still he remains shackled. Still bravely battling on for his freedom and for that of others.I have raised the issue with my local M.P , perhaps you could do the same. Remember too the company G48 that provides equipment for the prison administration. G48 realises that they are used in non-humanitarian ways against Palestinian prisoners. It must be held accountable for its responsibilty to these prisoners and its partnership to the occupation in its inhumane practices.He is currently living his last hours, this plight of administrative detention, is barbaric and must stop. He has a right to live , to not die without a charge. His situation is urgent and critical and is the worst since he started his strike. According to the Red Cross he is in his last dying moments.Still hungry for freedom.
Samer himself has lost many family members over the years, murdered by the Israeli occupation. In 1989 his grandmother Fatima was shot by the Israeli Occupying Forces.Hunger strikes have proven to be an effective means for Palestinian Political prisoner to protest. They are protesting against the inhumanr conditions that they are forced to live in. These non-violent hungers have arippling effect on all Palestinian prisoners. Their movement has commenced many detainess passing away and others gaining freedom. Their protest a peaceful weapon of resistance has been largely ignored by the B.B.C using cruel and bizzare excuses for doing so http://electronicintifada.net/content/bbcs-cruel-excuses-ignoring-palestinian-hunger-strikes/12072. I urge you to write or subit a complaint on line about their lack of reportage on this issue, which clearly shows a form of bias.
I for one will not forget them.
Captive Bird - Fadawa Fagan
The echoe of your melody reaches us, flying over narrowness with love, over the bars.
Captive bird, blend of darkness and pain.
Sing, yes, because if the iron deprives you of the vast sky.It will never be able to shut our ears.
Sing, yes, because the grip of the night never closes the way of hope.
Your song reminds me of your times bent from the sands of time. When with a light step, you would free
your wings, to the cloister shadow of jasmine, they were leading you to the womb, and you told us about the
dreams, and the pride and the strength you would laud, and closer you would get the stars to the ground,
and we listened to the fiellds made green by you, the splendour of hillocks, and the whisper of perfumes,
pride without rising,unless you win. .
Sing bird for u, from prison, over the humiliation and beyond the darkness, a horizon still full of dreams.
A sun yet readily ambush. White glory of light sings happily, sings a future homeland for our dreams,
sings of vivid dreams not lost. Sing yes, for the hope is always there, the road is still and radiant,
although around us, the anger of the night thickens.
from Nablus 1st March 1917 till 12th of December 2008
Poem translated by Elettra Luisa
Hunger - Doc Jazz ( Free Samer Issawi)
song dedicated to the courageous Palestinian hunger strikers among those held in so called administration detention by the occupation forces of the Zionist entity that calls itself 'Israel. This song was inspired specifically by Samer Issawi on his 199th day of hunger strike at the upload of this video.
Edwin Muir described himself thus: " I was born before the Industrial Revolution, and am now about two hundred years old. But I have skipped a hundred and fifty of them. I was really born in 1737, and till I was fourteen no time accidents happened to me. Then in 1751, I set out from Orkney for Glasgow. When I arrived I found that it was not 1751. but 1901, and that a hundred and fifty years had been burned up in my two day's journey. But I myself was still in 1751, and remained there for a long time. All my life since I have been trying to overhaul the invisible leeway. No longer I am obsessed with Time." (Extract from Diary 1937 -39)
He was born at Deerness on Orkney, Scotland in 1887, and educated at Kirkwall Burgh School. Sadly, his family lost their farm which was known as 'The Bur' a place that he loved dearly, that held special resonance in his heart.
Unfortunately a combination of high rents and poverty forced a move to Glagow. Moving from his beloved homeland , he was also forced to take on a number of menial jobs, and became increasingly involved and interested in left wing politics. He taught himself German, read Nietzsch and joined the Independent Labour Party. This was followed by a number of sad events, first his father died, then his two brothers and finally his mother. In 1919 he married Willy Anderson after a peroid of depression and seld doubting,and they subsequently moved to London in search of work, a move he did not take lightly as he viwed his former life in Orkney as a kind of 'Eden, and this transition he thought of as a journey to hell. In 1921, they moved to Prague where he wrote journalism and essays that earned him acclaim in England and America.
He was a relatively late developer with his writing, and only came to real prominence with the publication of his book The Labyrinth in 1949.Most of his best work was written after the age of fifty. Many of the poems in this book were based on Muir's experiences while working for the British Council in Prague immediately after the war, and the book remains one of the most consistent and serious collections of poems to be published since 1941.He became rather prolific, and his work marked his reputation as a severe and very Scottish writer whose work sometimes seems marred by an excessive plainess of style, but his best work rises to a massive seriousness.Informed by the Scottish ballads and incidents from his Orkney childhood and Calvinist background, they seem to me to be mystical and visionary, confronting the struggles between good and evil, life and history as an existential journey. With his wife he was the first to translate the writings of Franz Kafka and Heinrich Mann, and into English and became increaingly interested by developments in modernist European literature.
Today he is identified as one of the central figures of the modern Scottish literary Renaissance, both for his poems and his book Scott and Scotland (1936) - in which he argued controversially that Scottish literature would have a better chance of international recognition if it were written in English, a line that brought him into direct opposition to the Lallans movement of Hugh Mac Diarmid, another literary force of this era.
He and his wife travelled extensively to Italy, Prague. Salzburg, Vienna.Spending considerable time on the continent, which allowed him to immerse himself in its culture. He had a long association too with his fellow Orcadian poet George Mackay Brown. Whether abroad or at home in London he did all that he could to keep in touch with Scottish affars, and in his autobiography he expressed his yearning for its independence, and more than likely would have approved of the calls for home rule that are being called for at this moment in time in Scotland.
In 1946 he was appointed Director of the British Council. In 1950 he became warden of Newbattle Abbey College, a college for working class men, and iin 1955 he was made Norton Professor of English at Harvaed University.Though he had been a staunch socialist in his earlier years, through his experinces of living and travelling Czechoslavakia, he had witnessed totaltarianism at first hand, and his later poems took on a more cynical air. The influence of his strict Calvinist upbringing and strong religious faith, remained undimmed , but nevertheless he did not let the human spirit go unchallenged.He still had the need to question and probe.Though I personally have no religious faith, I still respect his poetic pulse and the clarity of his vision. An intriguing writer nevertheless, whatever your beliefs.
He died in 1959 and is buried at Swaffham Priory, near Cambridge.
A particular favourite poem of mine by him is the Horses, which takes him into the realms of science fiction. A terrifying picture of a world after nuclear disaster painted in the opening section, is then beautifully contrasted with the arrival later of the mythical horses. They remind me a little of the white horses of the Camargue as they appear in a famous French slow-motion film, but in fact they are the farm horses which Muir remembered from his childhood in the Orkneys. This is perhaps the most movingly optimistic poem to have come out of the world of the hydrogen bomb.
The Horses
Barely a twelvemonth after
The seven days war that put the world to sleep,
Late in the evening the strange horses came.
By then we had made our covenance with silence,
But in the first few days it was so still
We listened to our breathing and were afraid.
On the second day
The radios failed; we turned the knobs; no answer.
On the third day a warship passed us, heading north.
Dead bodies piled on the deck. On the sixth day
A plane plunged over us into the sea. Thereafter
Nothing. The radio dumb;
And still they stand in corners of our kitchens,
And stand, perhaps, turned on, in a million rooms
All over the world. But now if they should speak,
If on a sudden they should speak again,
If on the stroke of noon a voice should speak,
We would not listen, we would not let it bring
That old bad world that swallowed its children quick
At one great gulp. We would not have it again.
Sometimes we think of the nations lying asleep,
Curled blindly in impenetrable sorrow,
And then the thought confounds us with its strangeness.
The tractors lie about our fields; at evening
They look like dank sea-monsters couched and waiting.
We leave them where they are and let them rust:
'They'll moulder away and be like other loam.'
We make our oxen drag our rusty ploughs,
Long laid aside. We have gone back
Far past our fathers' land.
And then, that evening
Late in the summer the strange horses came.
We heard a distant tapping on the road,
A deepening drumming; it stopped, went on again
And at the corner changed to hollow thunder.
We saw the heads
Like a wild wave charging and we were afraid.
We had sold our horses in our fathers' time
To buy new tractors. Now they were strange to us
As fabulous steeds set on an ancient shield
Or illustrations in a book of knights.
We did not dare go near them. Yet they waited,
Stubborn and shy, as if they had been sent
By an old command to find our whereabouts
And that long-lost archaic companianship.
In the first moment we had never a thought
That they were creatures to be owned and used.
Among them were some half-a-dozen colts
Dropped in some wilderness of the broken world.
Yet new as if they had come from their own Eden,
Since then they have pulled our ploughs and borne our
loads,
But that free servitude still can pierce our hearts.
Our life changed, their coming our beginning.
The White horses of Camargue
The following poem , clearly draws on one of Kafkas main themes, conveying the helplessness of civilians in the face of officialdom.
The Interrogation
We could have crossed the road but hesitated,
And then came the patrol:
The leader conscientious and intent,
The men surly, indifferent.
While we stood by and waited
The interrogation began. He says the whole
Must come out now, who what we are,
Where we have come from, with what purpose, whose
Country or camp we plot for or betray,
Question on question
We have stood and answered through the standing day
And watched across the road beyond the hedge
The careless lovers in pairs go by'
Hand linked in hand, wandering another star,
So near we could shout to them. We cannot choose
Answer or action here,
Though still the careless lovers saunter by
And the thougtless field is near.
We are on the very edge,
Endurance almost done,
And still the interrogation is going on.
The following two express his visionary religious impulses. His eternal quest so to speak.
Merlin
O merlin in your crystal cave
Deep in the diamond of the day,
Will there ever be a singer
Whose music will smooth away
The furrow drawn by Adam's finger
Across the memory and the wave?
Or a runner who'll outrun
Man's long shadow driving on,
Break through the gate of memory
And hang the apple on the tree?
Will your magic ever show
The sleeping bride shut in her bower,
The day wreathed in its mound of snow
and Time locked in his tower.
The Good Man in Hell
If a good man were ever housed in Hell
By needful error of the qualities
Perhaps to prove the rule or shame the devil,
Or speak the truth only a stranger sees,
Would he, surrendering quick to obvious hate,
Fill half eternity with cries and tears,
Or watch beside Hell's little wicket gate
In patience for the first ten thousand years,
Feeling the curse climb slowly to his throat
That, uttered, dooms him to rescindles ill,
Forcing his prsying tongue to run by rote,
Eternity entire before him still?
Would he at last, grown faithful in his station,
Kindle a little hope in hopeless Hell,
And now among the damned the damned doubts of damnation,
Since here someone could live and could live well?
One doubt of evil would bring down such a grace,
Open such a gate, all Eden could enter in,
Hell be a place like any other place,
And love and hate and life and death begin.
and finally this one which I think is rather magificent with wonderful powerful imagery.
Scotland's Winter
Now the ice lays its smooth claws on the sill,
The sun looks from the hill
Helmed in hus winter saket,
And sweeps his artic sword across the sky.
The water at the mill
Sounds more hoarse and dull
The miller's daughter walking by
With frozen fingers soldiered to her basket
Seems to be knocking
Upon a hundred leagues of floor
With her light heels, and mocking
Percy and Douglas dead,
And Bruce on his burial bed,
Where he lies white as may
With wars and leprosy,
And all the kings before
This land was songless,
This land that with its dead and living waits the judgement day.
But they, the powerless dead,
Listening can hear no more
Than a hard tapping on the floor
A little overhead
Of common heels that do not know
Whence they come or where they go
And are content
with their frozen life and shallow banishment.
"Most of the trouble in this world has been caused by folks who can't mind their own business, because they have no business of their own to mind." - William Seward Burroughs.
To bad Bill that you aren't around to see the shape of things today, my beating heart thinks that on most things, you were probably right. Our plaintive meows still cry out. Nothing matters, nothing changes, happy 99th Birthday. Their are various forms of death, permutations gathering storms, but that does not mean that everything is lost. Everybody in, everybody out.
Fear and the Monkey (August 1978)
This text arrange in my New York loft, which is the converted locker room of an old YMCA. Guests have reported the prescence of a ghost boy. So this is a Oui-Ja board poem taken from Dumb Instrument, a book of poems by Denton Welch, and spells and invocations from the Necronomicon, a highly secret magical text released in paberback. There is a pinch of Rimbaud, a dash of St-John Perse, an oblique reference to Toby Tyler with the Circus, andthe death of his pet monkey.
Turgid itch and the perfume of death
On a whispering south wind
A smell of abyss and of nothingness
Dark Angel of the wandereres howls through the loft
With sick smelling sleep
Morning dream of a lost monkey
Born and muffled under old whimsies
With rose leaves in closed jars
Fear and the monkey
Sour tastes of green fruit in the dawn
The air milky and spiced with the trade winds
White flesh was showing
His jeans were so old
Leg shadows by the sea
Morning light
On the sky light of a littlle shop
On the odour of cheap wine in the sailor's quarter
On the fountain sobbing in the police courtyards
On the statue of moldy stone
On the little boy whistling to stray dogs.
Wanderers cling to their fading home
A lost train whistle wan and muffled
In the loft night taste of water
Morning light on milky flesh
Turgid itch ghost hand
Sad as the death of monkeys
Thy father a falling star
Crystal bone into thin air
Night sky
Dispersal and emptiness
Originally published as William S.Burroughs. "Fear and the Monkey," Pearl 6 (Odense , Denmark:Fall/Winter, 1978) Mine taken from The Burroughs File, City Lights, 1984
Is Everybody in - William S. Burroughs
Words and Advice for young People - William S. Burroughs
After Imbolc, as spring awakens,
under inches of soil,
they are waiting to roar,
anticipitating the moment,
to thrust out, in vast spread.
Amorous sleepers,
that wake our senses,
year after year,
white heads,
that hang around in corners.
Temporary residents,
side by side,
go back to earth,
and hibernate.
Leave without struggle,
wait paitiently to waken,
and bloom again,
rise like hope,
pushed again,
from down below.
AMEN
Far from this madding crowd
As the birds that fly high above
their are some who are not among us
who follow forever
alpha and omegas pulse.
The articulate and confused
still seek some learning
get lost in blind faith
because of trust in ancient
books of judgement.
We can all gain strength,
in answering back
clinging in still ferocity
to the clasp of heaven's mercy. Touching the earth,
feeling its love
sharing humanity's depths
until rivulets end
and all our tears run
in rivers of abadonment
Anas Al-Barbarawi is an artist from Jordan. Of Palestinian origin, he grew up in the Talbieh Refugee Canp south of Amman. But he doesn't want that to be all you think of him.
In the short stop-motion film Matar (Rain) produced in conjunction with the Palestinian Memory Documentation Project. Al-Barbarawi hopes to cross borders and question stereotypes of the refugee life.
Sad to hear yesterday that the poetry community had lost another fine distinctive voice.Anshelm Hollo was born and raised in Helsinki, Finland, and worked as a poet, translator, editor, journalist and teacher in Sweden, Germany, Austria, England (for 8 years), and, since 1966, the United States. He was the authour of some forty plus books of poetry. Including Maya (1970), Souourner Micrcosm(1977) and Near Miss Haiku (1990).
He became widely known for his many translations of European poetry, including the work of Russian poet Andrei Voznesenksy and the Finnish poet Penti Sarrikoski. He also translated people as variant as Jean Genet and Rosa Luxemburg. I first became aware of him I guess through his 1965 appearance at the Underground International Poetry Incarnation.Here dressed head to toe in black he appeared alongside Alexander Trocchi and Allen Ginsberg.
His style was strongly influenced by the American beats, and he was also adept at capturing isolated moments of perception. Often whimsical and gently satirical in tone, his poems were open-ended, valuing an ongoing human attentiveness rather than rejecting closure on the basis of theory.
He did nort care to much about prizes, he wrote because basically that is what he needed to do. He did manage to get the title of the United States Anti-Laureate, to which he was elected by the Buffalo Poetics list back at the turn of the century.
He lived in Boulder, Colorada with his wife visual artist Dalrymple Hollo, where since 1985 he was the Professor at the Bhuddist inspired Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics at Naropa University. On all accounts because of his gentle , unassuming manner he was loved by all who came across him., close friends of many other great American poets like Ted Berrigan and Robert Creeley.
He died on January 29th 2013 after post operative pneumonia aged 78. Anselm Hollo R.I.P. The lights may switch off but we carry on receiving
Shed the Fear
Who has a face sees
the world,
but the world
is not
to be borne-
or only
when seen as
another:
how did this
come together? How
did I find you?
so many turns
in the road
so few of them
possible!
How not to spin out
in hairpin turns
of disbelief...
TheSufi martyrs
insisted
"The world
is a wedding"
Why not go with them,
in the face of
present carnage
centuries
later.
Godlike
when you suddenly
feel like talking
about the times
in your life when you were
a total idiot asshole you resist
the impulse
& just sit there
at the head of the table
beaming
Further Reading: Notes on the Possibilities and Attractions of Existence Selected Poems 1965 - 2000 (Coffe House Press 2001)
Following Sundays post a short film about the governments secret war on the most vulnerable. This however is just the tip of the iceburg. As seen on Panorama programme on Monday night, ' The Current Disability Sham'http://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b01qgk9h that exposed the governments work providers techniques in treating the above.Benefit claimants including disabled people were referred to as LTB - code for "Lying thieving Bastards" by staff at Triage, a firm responsible for delivering the Governments £5billion work programme. Well this acronyym now fits perfectly for the party that has sought to implement these programmes, LTB =Lying Tory Bastards. Everyday we are being treated with contempt under the auspices of a government that simply do not care. Their war of attrition is based on depriving the most deserving of the means to live.
Blessed are the poor. This punishing ordeal has to stop. What kind of society are we living. This grim vile return, by our Government to the Dickensian era. This is growing everyday, that I sincerely believe to be cruel ,unjust and immoral.
I used to think that only love could break our hearts, but that too is a lie. Why are not the police, taking statements, for what they are doing is surely hateful and a crime.Silver spoon fed Tories attacking our senses everyday. Instead of a war on poverty it is a war on the poor. The rich get richer and the poor sink further into the depths. I remember Thatcher she was heartless and cruel, but this lot are really taking the piss.Hunting us, seems to be the Tory Party's new bloodsport of choice.
Four years ago my voice was nearly lost, but then I discovered the power of the internet, a medium by which I gain a little bit of strength, nowadays we don't have to be completely alone.
We might merely be mere statistics, for them, but there is definitely something wrong with their machine. They are making prisoners of us all, we must stand up and tear down their walls. Thatchers policies blighted generations, the scars that she created,are still running deep, and now their doing it all over again.
When April comes it will be one of the cruellest times of our lifes, when even further destructive policies will be implemented, like the bedroom tax, increases in council tax, nearly every single person on benefits will be affected, all limited to a 1% rise below inflation. Along with devatating cuts to essential services, the damage created by their wrecking hands will be clearly felt.
Where is the oppposition in Parliament, a few raised but most in silence, the Liberals bleat but carry on regardless, Labours proving to be a feeble opposition.. All shackled to corporations and morally bankrupt.
Many turning outside of Parliament for comfort and protection, I salute those who are raising their voices in clear opposition, in angry defiance.In the grips of the worst recession for years, members of parliament reward themselves a hefty £20,000 pay rise, a clearly rotten system and somethings gotta change.
Nye Bevan was right when he said " No amount of cajolery and no attempts at ethical or social seduction, can eradicate from my heart a deep burning hatred for the Tory Party. So far as I am concerned they are lower than vermin." I would add that we should show contempt to all who help them. All governments are vulnerable to mass opposition, the polltax in the 1980's was destroyed because of the anger that arose on the streets, it is sad that it has come to this ,but they should not be allowed to get away with what they are doing. We must stop them before their damage causes to much irrevocable harm.Their punishing us, but just how many bankers have been made to suffer because of the consequences of their actions?
Nicanor Parra is a Chilean poet, born in Chillan. He qualified as a teacher of mathematics and physics in 1938, in 1943 he studied physics in the U.S.A. and returned to Chile as a professor at the University of Chile. He is one of the best known Chilean poets after Pablo Neruda. His sister Violeta was one of Chiles most renknowed folk singers. He himself has described himself as an anti-poet, due to to his distaste for standard poetic pomp and function. Influenced by the everyday, as well as a potent mix of Marxist politics, now 97, his poems have power I believe, because he is accessible and understood by ordinary people. He utilised the speech patterns of the Chilean lower classes in much of his poetry, combining provocativeness with a gentle playfulness. His poetry speaks too of inner struggles as well as the struggles going on in his own country. Foremost his poems speak fom the heart, using humour and cynicism to convey his dissatisfaction with the world, allowing him to embrace the political as well as the human pulse. This allows his poetry to be accessible to all, reaching out to as wide an audience as possible, beyond the confines of literary convention and the corridors of academia. He once said " Poetry is all around us" "It is in the graffito on the walls, I walk around and write down the graffiti, those are my poems." Still breaking through the barriers,metamorposing language with all it's possibilities.He has been nominated several times for the Nobel Prize in Literature. I personally am reminded of the American Beat poets, and the late Allen Ginsberg himself announced Parra as one of the most influential poets of our time, which is sweet enough for me.
The vices of the modern world
Modern delinquents
Are authorised to convene daily in parks and gardens.
Equipped with powerful binoculars and pocket watches
They break into kiosks favoured by death
And install their laboratories among the rosebshes in
full flower.
From there they direct the photogrrapher and beggars
that roam the neighbourhood
Trying to raise a small temple to misery
And, if they get a chance, having some woebgone
shoeshine boy.
The cowed police run from these monsters
Making for the middle of town
Where the great year's end fires are breaking out
And a hooded hero is robbing two nuns at gun point.
The vices of the modern world:
The motor car and the movies,
Racial discrimination,
The extermination of the Indian,
The manipulation of high finance,
The catastrophe of the aged,
The clandenstine white-slave trade carried on by
international sodomites,
Self-advertisement and gluttony,
Expensive funerals,
Personal friends of his Excellency,
The elevation of folklore to a spiritual category,
The abuse of soporifics and philosophy,
The softening upof men favoured by fortune,
Auto-eroticism and sexual cruelty,
The exaltation of the study of dreams and the sub-
conscious to the detriment of common sense,
The exaggerated faith in serums and vacines,
The deification of the phallus,
The international spread-legs policy patronised by the
reactionary press,
The unbounded lust for power and money,
The gold rush,
The fatal dollar dance,
Speculation and abortion,
The destruction of idols,
Overdevelopment of dietics and pedagogical psychology,
The vices of dancing, of the cigarette, of games of chance,
The drops of blood that are often found on the sheets of
newlyweds,
The madness of the sea,
Agraphobia and claustrophobia,
The disintigration of the atom,
The gory humour of the theory of relativity,
The frenzy to return to the womb,
The cult of the exotic,
Aeroplane accidents,
Incinerations, mass purges, retention of passports,
All thisjust because,
To produce vertigo,
Dream-analysis,
And the spread of radiomania.
As has been demonstrated
The modern world is composed of artificial flowers
Grown under bell jars like death,
It is made of movie stars
And bloo-smeared boxers fighting by moonlight
And nightingale-men controling the economic lives of
the nations
With certain easily explained devices;
Usually they are dressed in black like precursors of
autumn
And cat roots and wild herbs.
Meanwhile the wise, gnawed by rats,
Rot in the crypts of cathedrals
And souls with the slightest nobility are relentlessly
persecuted by the police.
The modern world is an enormous sewer,
The chic restaurants are stuffed with disgusting corpses
And birds flying dangerously low.
That's not all; the hospitals are full of imposters,
To say nothing of those heirs of the spirit who found
colonies in the anus of each new surgical case.
Modern industrialists occasionally suffer from the effects
of the poisoned atmosphere.
They are stricken at their sewing machines by the
terrifying sleeping sickness
Which eventually turn them into angels, of a sort.
They deny the existence of the physical world
And brag about being poor children of the grave.
And yet the world has always been like this.
Truth, like beauty, is neither created nor lost
And poetry is in things themselves or is merely a mirage
of the spirit.
I admit that a well-planned earthquake
Can wipe out a city rich in traditions in a matter of
seconds,
And that a meticulous aerial bombardment
Smashes trees, horses, thrones, music,
But what does it matter
If, while the world's greatest ballerina
Is dying, poor and abandoned, in a village in southern
France,
Spring restores to man a few of the vanished flowers.
What I say is, let's try to be happy, sucking on the
miserable human rib.
Let's extract from it the restorative liquid,
Each one following his personal inclinations.
Let's cling to this divine table-scrap!
Panting and trembling,
Let's suck those maddening lips.
The lot is cast.
Let's breathe in this enervating and destructive perfume
And for one more day live the life of the elect.
Out of his armpits man extracts the wax he needs to
mould the face of hios idols
And out of woman's sex the straw and the mud for his
temples.
Therefore
I grow a louse on my tie
And smile at the imbeciles descending from the trees.
Young Poets
Write as you will
In whatever style you like
Too much blood has run under the bridge
To go on believing
That only one road is right.
In poetry everything is permitted.
With only this condition, of course:
You have to improve on the blank page.
Warnings
In case of fire
Do not use elevators
Use stairways
unless otherwise instructed
No smoking
No littering
No shitting
No radio playing
unless otherwise instructed
Please Flush Toilet
After Each Use
Except When Train
is Standing At Station
Be thoughtful
Of The Next Passenger
Onward Christian Soldiers
Workers of the World unite
we have nothing to lose
but our life Glory to the Father
and to the Son and the Holy Ghost
unless otherwise instructed
By the way
We also hold these truths to be
self evident
That all nan are created
That they have been endowed
by their creator
With certain inaliable rights
That among these are: Life
Liberty and the pursuit of happiness
and last but not least
that 2 and 2 makes 4
unless otherwise instructed.
Further reading
Nicanor Parra: Poems & Anti Poems New Diections, 1985
Anti-Poems: how to look better and feel good -Nicanor Parra, New Directions, 2004
After Dinner Reservations - Nicacor Parra Host Publications, 2007
Library computers playing up at the moment, made me realise how reliant I have become to the daily use of their portals. Has it all become another addiction, another distraction.
In the meantime I offer you this.
' And Zarathustra ran and ran, but he fond no one else, and was alone and ever found himself again; he enyoyed and quaffed his solitude, and thought of good things - for hours. About the hour of noontide, however, when the sun stood exactly over Zarathustra's head, he passed an old, bent and gnarled tree, which was encircled round by the ardent love of a vine, and hidden from itself; from this there hung yellow grapes in abundance, confronting the wanderer. Then he felt inclined to quench a little thirst, and to break off for himself a cluster of grapes. When, however, he had alreadsy his arm outstretched for that purpose, he felt still more inclined for something else - namely, to lie down beside the tree at the hour of perfect noontide and sleep. This Zarathustra did; and no sooner had he laid himself on the ground in the stillness and secrecy of the variegated grass, than he had forgotten his little tirst, and fell asleep. For as the proverb of Zarathustra saith: "One thing is more necessary than the other". Only that his eyes remained open :- for they never grew weary of viewing and admiring the tree and the love of the vine. In falling asleep, however, Zarathustra spake thus to his heart: "Hush! Hush! Hath not the world now become perfect? What hath happened unto me? As a delicate wind danceth invisibly upon parqueted sea, light, feather-light, so- danceth sleep upon me. No eye doth it close to me, it leaveth my soul awake. Light is it, verily, feather-light. It persaudeth me, I know not how, it toucheth me inwardly with a caressing hand, it constraineth me. Yea, it constrainth me, so that my soul stretcheth itself out :- - How long and weary it becometh, my strange soul! Hath a seventh-day evening come to it precisely at noontide? Hath it already wandered too long, blissfully, among good and ripe things? It stretcheth itself out, long- longer! it lieth still, my strange soul. Too many good things hath it already tasted; this golden sadness oppresseth it, it distorteth its mouth. - As a ship that putteth into the calmest cove:- it now drwaeth up to the land, waery of long voyages and uncertain seas. Is not the land more faithful? As such aship huggeth the shore, tuggeth the shore:- then it sufficeth for a spider to spin its thread from the ship to the land. No stronger ropes are required there. As such a weary ship in the calmest cove, so do I also now repose, nigh to the earth, faithful, trusting, waiting, bound to it with the lightest threads. O happiness! O happiness! Wilt thou perhaps sing, O my soul? Thou liest in the grass. But this is the secret, solemn hour, when no shepherd playeth his pipe. Take care! Hot noontide sleepth on the fields. Do not sing! Hush! Thw world is perfect. Do not sing, thou prairie-bird, my soul! Do not even whisper! Lo-hush! The old noontide sleeeth, it moveth its mouth: doth it notjust now drink a drop of happiness - - An old brown drop of golden happiness, golden wine? Something whisked over it, its happiness laugeth!' Thus-laugheth a God. Hush!- -'For happiness, how little sufficeth for happiness!' Thus I spake I once and thought myself wise. But it was a blasphemy: that have I now learned. Wise fools speak better. The least thing precisely, the gentlest thing, the lightest thing, a lizard's rustling, a breath, awhisk, an eye-glance - little maketh up the best happiness. Hush! -What hath befallen me: Hark! Hath time flown away? Do I not fall? Have I not fallen- hark! into the well of eternity? -What happened to me? Hush! It stingeth me-alas- to the heart? To the heart! Oh, break up, break up, my heart, after such happiness, after such a sting! -What? Hath not the orld just now become perfect? Round and ripe? Oh, for the golden round ring - whither doth it fly? Let me run after it! Quick! Hush-" (and here Zarathustra stretched himself, and felt that he was asleep.) "Up!" said he tohimself, "thou sleeper! Thou noontide sleeper! Well tye, up, ye old legs! It is time and more than time; many a good stretch of road is still awaiting you- Now you have slept your fill; for how long a time? A half-eternity! Well then, up now, mine old heart! For how long after such a sleep mayest thou- remain awake?" (But then did he fall asleep anew, and his soul spake against him and defended itself,and lay down again) - "Leave me alone! Hush! Hath not the world just now become perfect? Oh, for the goldeen round ball!" "Get up," said Zarathustra, " thou little thief, though sluggard! What! Still stretching thyself, yawning, sighing, falling into deep wells? Who art thou then, O my soul?" (and here he became frightened, for a sunbeam shot down from heaven upon his face.) "O heaven above me," said he sighing, and sat upright, " thou gazest at me? Thou hearkenest unto my strange soul? When wilt thou drink this drop of dew that fell down upon all earthly things, - when wilt thou drink this strange soul- -When, thou well of eternity! thou joyous, awful, noontide abyss! when wilt tou drink my soul back into thee?" Thus spake Zarathustra, and rose from his couch beside the tree, as if awakening from a srange drunkeness: and behold! there stood the sun still exactly above his head. One nigh, however, rightly infer therefrom that Zarathusttra had not then slept long.
Sodastream's factory is an illegal Israeli settlement built on land stolen from the Palestinians. Each and everypackage contains human rights abuses and violations of international law. Boycott Sodasream.
For more infomation: http://www.bdsmovement.net/tag/sodastream
These are supposed to be the days of our lives
but after many years shaking tears of branches,
we have become a perfect foil for tonques that bark
all of us have maddening faces now, causes to love,
lighting up corners waiting to be fed
beyond the terminus of governments stealth,
one of the most singular weaknesses of the human spirit.
is how those in powers persuade us to like what they choose.
A lot of us though who have been forgotten,
still able to sting, beyond their schemes
with our cracked lips, we contain the storm
tomorrow, we will smother all their words.
Yesterday marked eleven years since the first men were taken to Guantanamo Bay.This is 3 years since President Obama promised to bring this to an end. Many of the remaining detainess left languishing in this prison camp have been cleared for release years ago, never in a court of law have any been condemned for committing any crime. The only lasting legacy I see at the moment is one of shame.
One such detainee is British resident Shaker Aamer who has been held without charge or trial for nearly eleven years. He has been cleared for release by the U.S administration but remains in prison. He is now 44 years old, thousands of miles away from his family who have not seen him for over a decade. He is riddled with arthritis and other medical complaints, the result - he and his lawyers claim of brutal torture and solitary confinement, and the ongoing denial of adequate medical attention.Our Government has failed to honour promises to free him, denying him the justice that he deserves.
Hopefully this will be the year that Guantanemo finally closes, it is time to reunite Mr Aamer with his family too.
Please join thousands in signing amnesty internationals petition calling on his freedom, along with others held in Guantanamo, in order to show that they have not been forgotten
Herbert Huncke is the pivotal figure in the develpoment of beat literature. Huncke's use of the carny term beat in his stories of riding the rails in the thirties inspired Jack Kerouac to chronicle his own tale of rootless wandering in On the Road. He turned William Burroughs onto heroin, and appears as a character in Burroughs Junky, the first step in an immersion in addict culture that would produce Naked Lunch, and the image of Huncke's shoes filled with blood traming 42nd Street gave Allen Ginsberg the very model of the angel-headed hipster in his seminal poem Howl. He got to the ripe old age of 81, he would have neen 98 today, so happy birthday Herbert,thanks.
I recommend any of his books, if you can get hold of them, seminal and in my opinion the work of genius.
MORE HERE
Link to rather wonderful " from dream to dream" album
G4s is up for the Public Eye People's Award 2013, the 'name and shame' award no company wants to win. G4S, the world's largest Private Military and Security Company, is complicit in Israel's occupation of Palestine and is profiting from conflict and insecurity across the world.
War on Want (with allies) has nominated G4S for the awards which help to "shine an international spotlight on corporate scandals." The company has been shortlisted and is now up for the public vote .They have been up to now one of our governments favourites, with contracts of over £ 600 million being awarded to them. But their record is far from spotless. The firm lost their previous 'forcible deportation' contract last September after recieving 773 complaints of abuse - both verbal and physical, it profits from imprisoning refugees while it abuses families and children in their care. In October 2010, an Angolan asylum seeker died as a result of his forced deportation by G4S guards.A truly appalling record. http://notog4s.blogspot.co.uk/
Online voting is underway. Their are 6 other villainous corporations that you could vote for too.
1. Alstom (FR)
2.Coal India (IN)
3. Goldman Sachs (USA)
4. Lonmin (ZA)
5. Repower (CH)
6.Shell (NL)
At the end of January, within sight of the World Economic Forum (WEF) the Berne Declaration and Greenpeace will then confer the Public Eye Awards for the worst cases of contempt for the environment and human rights.
It is with sadness that I have discovered that poet and spoken word performer and civil rights activist Jayne Cortez has died aged 76.
An activist in the Civil Rights movement, she was an organiser of the Watts writing and dance workshop. She was also the founder of the Watts Repositary Theatre, Bola Press and co-founder of the Organisation of Women Writers of Africa.
In her poetry, she spoke of revolution, which she believed could be used to heal us all, using her voice in a powerful incantory way, using the rythyms of blues and jazz to deliver her messages of fierce, biting, social criticism to be used as imperatives of personal responsibility and change. A devotee of the artistic impulse that is jazz and blues, its impulses were to become a constant theme, using its rythyms as sparks and she became a close friend to many of the jazz greats and members of the avant garde fraternity.
I first discovered her through my own love of jazz, she was married to Ornette Coleman from 1954 until she divorced him in 1964 and I subsequently used to have some of her work on a compilation of freejazz, with her voice used as a bridge between tracks, wish I still had to it. She is best listened to when heard, rather than directly from the page, a precursor to what is now known as hip hop.She and Ornette had a son together, jazz drummer Denardo Coleman who she collaberated with on a number of occasions in his firespitters band. She later remarried in 1976 to sculptor Mel Edwards.
Her work has since been translated into many languages and I am widely used to seeing her name published in various anthologies over the years. Using her voice to challenge and the travesties and injustices of our world. Her voice is celebrated for its political, surrealistic pulse and dynamic innovation, with her use of lyricism and visceral sound. Using her voice to represent to the world the perspectives of an African-American feminist, revolutionary in an oral tradition stretching back centuries. Remaining independent, determined, with her singular strong voice, her spirit and ideas savaged silence and the conformity of the masses, raging against the excessives of man and all his brutality.In all her rage she spoke of survival too.
Long may her voice sing with all its energy and passion and its force hit with vivid intention. Jayne Cortez - Artist on the Cutting edge
Jayne Cortez as she appeared in the 1982 film 'Poetry in Motion'
Jazz Fan Looks back - Jayne Cortez
I crisscrossed with Monk
Walked with Bud
Counted every star with Stitt
Sang "Don't Blame Me" with Sarah
Wore a flower like Billie
Screamed in the range of Dinah
& scatted "How High the Moon" with Ella Fitzgerald
as she blwe roof off the Shrine Auditorium
Jazz at the Philarmonic
I cut my hair into a permanrnt tam
Made my feet rebellious metronomes
Embedded record needles in paint on paper
Talked bopology talk
Laughed in high-pitched saxophone phrases
Became keeper of every Bird riff
every Lester lick
as Hawk melodicized my ear of infatuated tonques
& Blakey drummed militant messages in
soul of my applauding teeth
& Ray hit bass notes to the last love scene in my bones
I moved in triple time with Max
Grooved High with Diz
Perddoed with Pettiford
Flew home with Hamp
Shuffled in Dexter's Deck
Squatty-rooed with Peterson
Dreamed a "52nd Street Theme" with Fats
& scatted "Lady Be Good" with Ella Fitzgerald
as she blew roof off the Shrine Auditorium
Jazz at the Philarmonic
There it Is - Jayne Cortez
And if we don't fight
if we don't resist
if we don't organise and unify and
get the power to control our own lives
Then we will wear
the exagerrated look of captivity
the stylized look of suicide
the dehumanised look of fear
and the decomposed look of repression
forever and ever and ever
And there it is
If the Drum is a Woman - Jayne Cortez
If the drum is a woman
why are you pounding your drum into an insane
babble
why are you pistol shooting through the head of your drum
and making a drum tragedy of drums
if the drum is a woman
don't abuse your drum don't abuse your drum
don't abuse your drum
I know the night is full of displaced persons
I see skins striped with flames
I know the ugly disposition of underpaid clerks they constantly menstruate through the eyes
I know bitterness embedded in flesh
the itching alone can drive you crazy
I know that this is America and chicken are coming home to roost
on the MX missile
But if the drum is a woman
why are you choking your drum
why are you raping your drum
why are you saying disrespectful things
to your mother drum your sister drum
your wife drum and your infant daughter drum
if the drum is a woman
then understand your drum
your drum is not docile
your drum is not invisible
your drum is not inferior to you
your drum is a woman
so don't reject your drum don't try to dominate your drum
don't become weak and cold and desert your drum
don't be forced into the position
as an oppressor of drums and make a drum tragedy of drums
if the drum is a woman
don't abuse your drum don't abuse your drum
don't abuse our drum.....
