commentary on my own poems (2)
commentary on my own poems (2)
1
Schemas
2 Notes on my own poems to help in case of doubt.
3
4 poems from 'The Imaginary in Geometry'
5
6 “Jerusalem” CR Ashbee, the arts and crafts theorist, was town planner for Jerusalem in the early days of the League of Nations Mandate. to the mullions in the scatter of stone golden cubes: Ashbee took artisans from the East End of London to a new life in the Cotswolds. with the ripple of hammer-pats to say “hand-made”: the hand-made goods were expensive but held to contain virtue; manufacturers mass-produced the goods from moulds that imitated the marks of hand-made items, thus breaking the business in Chipping Camden.
7 Cotton Suq: cotton market
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9
10 “Wonders of Classification” The poem has a “double scheme”, about the collections which were the prehistory of museums, and about the acquisition of a body. I was thinking about the idea of “collections”.
11 The poem starts with the “object pouch” of an American Indian “medicine man”, because it is obvious that people were making collections of precious and rare objects before buildings were invented. (So the ‘cabinet of curiosities’ is an expansion of the medicine pouch.) Anomalous objects expose the classification system because they are exceptions to it; the early collections were of anomalies, wonders. Later “science” differs from “everyday knowledge” because the latter is sometimes wrong, at points exposed by anomalies. I was interested in the idea that a poem is a collection of objects before being a sequence of words.
12 Ambras: Schloss Ambras was where a Hapsburg Duke of the 16th century (Ferdinand II of Tyrol) kept a legendary collection of wonderful objects. Lhotsky wrote a book which describes it but the collection is long since dispersed. The motive for collecting may have been competition with a brother, also a collector. Tradescant: had a “hutch” for his collection of dried plants, a forerunner of a museum. Kenter? I think it may have been Johann Kentmann, actually. He had a “cabinet” of minerals around 1565. Raritätenkabinett: cabinet of rareties, or curiosities. “lesson objects” because “object lessons” were where children were shown sets of objects to familiarise them with shape and texture.
13 “to collect body parts”: we are still in the Natural History Museum, but the idea has now shifted, we are looking at evolution and an unnamed “collector” assembling body parts in order to acquire a body. This may hark back to the “talons” in the medicine pouch. The galvanic corpse-tensors/ Judgment Day trick riggers produced the articulated dinosaur skeletons famously on display in the museum in Kensington. missing a limb, and failing the test of pattern: a creature at this point is trying to acquire a body, for 15 lines, and repeatedly failing. ‘tetrapod’ is the four-legged creatures, descending from crossopterygian fish. lashing surf: to move on dry land you need limbs. The “surf” is also shapeless, where you try to acquire a shape. Gambas suras femoralia/ capitali centro cartilagini: from the Lorica of Laidcenn (ob. AD 661), a spell of protection involving a catalogue of body parts, in a strange sort of Latin. (variant 'cambas'). Here we are getting at the prehistoric levels of language, to go with the prehistory of acquiring four limbs, language is being nonsense but, rapidly, it evolves into something like words with their regular anatomy. The gambas suras etc. are a catalogue of body parts, almost as if we acquire limbs by naming them. a tray of birds’ legs rowed to speak: there was a case of legs from different birds showing how their anatomies differed.
14 Now the poem moves on to a new “collection of sensations”. A drip swelling to a sheet/ a flexible plane flaring as a wrapper/ restating a hole as an inside. records sensations on the skin. The creature is learning sensations to go with its new body. We are seeing household goods of a precious quality, because they test out fineness of perception: fine linen flows like milk. The wonders of classification applied to textiles and food. These are “lesson objects”.
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16 My notes record, “also a female “witch doctor” burial at Maglehoj. with in belt box: two horse’s teeth, some weasel bones, the claw joint of a cat, possibly a lynx, bones from a young mammal, a piece less than 1/2” long of a bird’s windpipe, some vertebrae from a snake, two burnt fragments of bone (human?), a twig of mountain ash, charred aspen, two pebbles of quartz, a lump of clay, two pieces of pyrites, a sheet of bronze and a piece of bronze wire bent at one end to form a hook. star patterns on bronze box and belt-fastener.” This (from Denmark) gives us the end of the poem. One can imagine these objects being assembled into the symbolic structure of a Bronze Age poem. The “box” is the forerunner of the cabinet of curiosities.
17
18 “The Spirit Mover, 1854”
19 John Murray Spear was a Spiritualist preacher and made a machine at the instruction of spirits. The poem describes this building project and then the locals destroying the machine at the end. the device of unknown purpose: the spirits did not tell Revd. Spear what the machine was for.
20
21
22 Anglophilia — a Romance of the Docks
Post settings Labels andrew duncan, No matching suggestions Published on 5/4/11 10:30 AM Permalink Location Options Loaded more posts.Post: Edit
2 Notes on my own poems to help in case of doubt.
3
4 poems from 'The Imaginary in Geometry'
5
6 “Jerusalem” CR Ashbee, the arts and crafts theorist, was town planner for Jerusalem in the early days of the League of Nations Mandate. to the mullions in the scatter of stone golden cubes: Ashbee took artisans from the East End of London to a new life in the Cotswolds. with the ripple of hammer-pats to say “hand-made”: the hand-made goods were expensive but held to contain virtue; manufacturers mass-produced the goods from moulds that imitated the marks of hand-made items, thus breaking the business in Chipping Camden.
7 Cotton Suq: cotton market
8
9
10 “Wonders of Classification” The poem has a “double scheme”, about the collections which were the prehistory of museums, and about the acquisition of a body. I was thinking about the idea of “collections”.
11 The poem starts with the “object pouch” of an American Indian “medicine man”, because it is obvious that people were making collections of precious and rare objects before buildings were invented. (So the ‘cabinet of curiosities’ is an expansion of the medicine pouch.) Anomalous objects expose the classification system because they are exceptions to it; the early collections were of anomalies, wonders. Later “science” differs from “everyday knowledge” because the latter is sometimes wrong, at points exposed by anomalies. I was interested in the idea that a poem is a collection of objects before being a sequence of words.
12 Ambras: Schloss Ambras was where a Hapsburg Duke of the 16th century (Ferdinand II of Tyrol) kept a legendary collection of wonderful objects. Lhotsky wrote a book which describes it but the collection is long since dispersed. The motive for collecting may have been competition with a brother, also a collector. Tradescant: had a “hutch” for his collection of dried plants, a forerunner of a museum. Kenter? I think it may have been Johann Kentmann, actually. He had a “cabinet” of minerals around 1565. Raritätenkabinett: cabinet of rareties, or curiosities. “lesson objects” because “object lessons” were where children were shown sets of objects to familiarise them with shape and texture.
13 “to collect body parts”: we are still in the Natural History Museum, but the idea has now shifted, we are looking at evolution and an unnamed “collector” assembling body parts in order to acquire a body. This may hark back to the “talons” in the medicine pouch. The galvanic corpse-tensors/ Judgment Day trick riggers produced the articulated dinosaur skeletons famously on display in the museum in Kensington. missing a limb, and failing the test of pattern: a creature at this point is trying to acquire a body, for 15 lines, and repeatedly failing. ‘tetrapod’ is the four-legged creatures, descending from crossopterygian fish. lashing surf: to move on dry land you need limbs. The “surf” is also shapeless, where you try to acquire a shape. Gambas suras femoralia/ capitali centro cartilagini: from the Lorica of Laidcenn (ob. AD 661), a spell of protection involving a catalogue of body parts, in a strange sort of Latin. (variant 'cambas'). Here we are getting at the prehistoric levels of language, to go with the prehistory of acquiring four limbs, language is being nonsense but, rapidly, it evolves into something like words with their regular anatomy. The gambas suras etc. are a catalogue of body parts, almost as if we acquire limbs by naming them. a tray of birds’ legs rowed to speak: there was a case of legs from different birds showing how their anatomies differed.
14 Now the poem moves on to a new “collection of sensations”. A drip swelling to a sheet/ a flexible plane flaring as a wrapper/ restating a hole as an inside. records sensations on the skin. The creature is learning sensations to go with its new body. We are seeing household goods of a precious quality, because they test out fineness of perception: fine linen flows like milk. The wonders of classification applied to textiles and food. These are “lesson objects”.
15
16 My notes record, “also a female “witch doctor” burial at Maglehoj. with in belt box: two horse’s teeth, some weasel bones, the claw joint of a cat, possibly a lynx, bones from a young mammal, a piece less than 1/2” long of a bird’s windpipe, some vertebrae from a snake, two burnt fragments of bone (human?), a twig of mountain ash, charred aspen, two pebbles of quartz, a lump of clay, two pieces of pyrites, a sheet of bronze and a piece of bronze wire bent at one end to form a hook. star patterns on bronze box and belt-fastener.” This (from Denmark) gives us the end of the poem. One can imagine these objects being assembled into the symbolic structure of a Bronze Age poem. The “box” is the forerunner of the cabinet of curiosities.
17
18 “The Spirit Mover, 1854”
19 John Murray Spear was a Spiritualist preacher and made a machine at the instruction of spirits. The poem describes this building project and then the locals destroying the machine at the end. the device of unknown purpose: the spirits did not tell Revd. Spear what the machine was for.
20
21
22 Anglophilia — a Romance of the Docks
Post settings Labels andrew duncan, No matching suggestions Published on 5/4/11 10:30 AM Permalink Location Options Loaded more posts.Post: Edit
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