Edwin Muir (15/5/1887 -3/1/59) - Orkney's Visionary Poet

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.

Further Reading

An Autobiography :- Faber 1954

Collected Poems 1921-1951 :-Faber 1952

Collected Poems :- Oxford University Press 1965

An Iraqi child asks Tony Blair and George Bush: Are you happy now? - Heathcote Williams

An Iraqi child written by Heathcotte Williams
Narration and montage Alan Cox

An Iraqi Child

An Iraqi child
is drawing bombers, like those
Which nearly killed him.

The bombs have left his face
Swollen with fierce injuries-
Marks of angry pain.

He draws the bombers,
Though his arm and some fingers
Are amputated.

Now they're bandaged up,
With three crayons firmly taped
To the ends of his stumps.

He draws, bleak, black lines
Chronichling his fistory.
"Who did this to me?"

"They had many planes.
They'd brought bombs to fit into each
Of their cruel planes."

"Why didn't they think
Of the people below?
Who drove all these planes?"

"One was called George Bush;
And one was called Tony Blair
With his friend, Campbell.

They'd made good friends
With lots of oil companies.
They wanted your oil.

To get into power
They'd made friends with newspapers
Who all said, "Yes, bomb Iraq'.

Rupert Murdoch, boss
Of News International,
Told a hundred and twenty

Of his newspapers
To write a leader
Urging reader's to support war.

No one was immune:
Even the Guardian
(Financed by Auto Trader).

Was saying 'Bomb!'
Claiming that Gulf Wars
Were humanitarian'  'wars'''.

"The simple cause",
Wrote the Guardian
In a pre-Iraq-war leader,

"At the end, is just."
And with the magic word,
'Humanitarian', cunning PR

Could make the liberal media
Mouth-pieces for war propoganda.
There  was a lifestyle

To be supported by Iraq's cheap oil,
So opinion formers in wine-bars and clubs
And in Parliamentary tea-rooms

And in TV studios' hospitality suites-
While not discussing their expenses
Or their mortgages and their fees

Or their cars or their lifestyles
Or their favourite restaurants
Or their children's private schools-

Would dip a toe in the zeitgest
And then bloviate
About regime change,

Like self-important sheep
Housing wolves
'I mean, obviously

"Well, they're all very rich."
"Maybe they'd buy my drawing?"
The boy says.

Thanks to below
for this one
http://www.stopwar.org.uk/

Happy Birthday Uncle Bill (5/2/14 -2/8/97) - Fear and the Monkey

"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

Snowdrops / Amen

SNOWDROPS

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

Palestinian Artist Shows Life Beyond Refugee Camps in Stop-Motion Film

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.

Anselm Hollo (12/4/34- 29/1/13) - Shed the Fear/ Godlike/ R.I.P

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)

The Secret Government War against the most vulnerable.

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 (b.5/9/14) - Anti-Poets of the World Unite.

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



Some useful links

The technique of Anti-Poetry
http://www.nicanorparra.uchile.cl/english/technique.html

Literature and Revolution - Fernando Alegria
http://www.webshells.com/jdoug/LitRev8.htm

Frederick Nietzsche (15/10/1844 -25/8/00) - Sleep at Noontide

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.

REPRINTED FROM
Thus Spake Zarathustra

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