comments on my own poems 3 (Savage Survivals)

comments on my own poems 3 (Savage Survivals) 1 Schemas for poems 2 ​ 3 This post contains comments on 'Savage Survivals' and 'Alien Skies'. 4 ​ 5 Poems from SAVAGE SURVIVALS 6 The “schema” for the book was to avoid autobiography (again), otherwise it was just to be frivolous in comparison with “The Imaginary in Geometry”. The title comes from an already existing book, I believe one produced by the Rationalist Association in about the 1930s. I liked the phrase without wanting it to mean very much. 7 ​ 8 Acoustic Shock 9 A harbour at West Bay in Dorset destroyed by a storm circa 1964. the soft wrapping of the tender membranes is a quote from the ‘Chaldaean Oracles”, where the throat of someone gives an oracle, aulos meaning ‘flute’. Qualmwasser water pushed at high pressure through cracks in a dam, in a description of a dam that I read. The holes in the earthen dam were made by a kind of mouse. frame capture: the process is dynamic but if you look at it frame by frame it starts to make sense. 10 ​ 11 ​ 12 ​ 13 ​ 14 The Border Hills 15 A flight to Edinburgh and memories of walking through the Border Hills. 16 Malt Shovel: my supervisor, Paul Beard, gave me a list of pubs to go to in Edinburgh. “Eighty Shilling” is a grade of beer, “ninety shilling” is so rare you can’t find it. 17 ​ 18 Weapons Form With Music There is a 13th century Chinese novel called The Water Margins, of which I am very fond. Mr Brian Holton translated it into Scots. This seemed like a good opportunity to write about Chinese outlaws in Scotland. Figures from Patrick Walker’s Biographia Presbyteriana also appear. I also used some martial arts magazines. 19 comprising: 20 ‘bring me an ink tablet’ 21 ‘Blue sword in white hand’ 22 5 Elements Ninja 23 ‘heroes in a bar’ 24 Scathach and the Striped Ones 25 ‘we turned the jingling horses’ heads for home’ 26 ‘a poofy bar’ 27 ‘From zenith to pupil’ 28 In Caledonia Dysarta 29 The Hand of Claverhouse 30 Cum furca et fovea 31 weapons form with invective 32 drownings at Wigtown

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

How I wrote some of my books

How I wrote some of my books recalled 2021 I seem to have written some of this down before, but I can’t locate it. I have incorporated texts from the jackets of various books. This deals with my early books. Early days At my school, there was a remedial class in the 6th form for scientists, who were perceived as being weak in use of English. I was in it because I was a linguist. The teacher was Neil Curry, a poet, and he taught us poetry. He used MacBeth's poetry 1900 to 1965 (? title). This was a breakthrough for me. We did ‘The Waste Land’, and I especially liked that. So this was from September 1972 on, going on until maybe April 1973, when classes stop to allow for A-level revision. Neil was an inspiring teacher and he actually understood modern poetry. So at some point early in 1973 I decided that writing poetry was for me. I wanted to write like Eliot or David Jones, which is the last thing that a 17 year old is going to bring off! So I was looking for a way of writing m...
Read more

Signals interview

This is an interview for Signals magazine from 2006. Unfortunately I can't remember the name of the interviewer - an attack of pure egoism on my part, I'm afraid. Q. Many of your poems are apparently inspired by historical and anthropological research. How does the incorporation of this information influence the shape and overall form of the poem? I agree that a poem like 'Anglophilia - a Romance of the Docks' (in  Geometry ) came out of historical research. I was looking at the history of design and came across a book called  The Projection of England , by Stephen Tallents. Then I was editing the selected poems of Joseph Macleod, and read his memories which are more about Tallents than anything else - he was completely paranoid about Tallents, who wrecked his career at the BBC. I was amazed by this coincidence. Tallents was controller of the Image of Britain in the 1930s - so I wrote a set of 15 poems set inside English myths. Were these poems influenced by the doc...
Read more

Reviews in full

More reviews Someone might be interested to see the history of reviewing, and like the rest of this website this is offered for somebody with that curiosity. In 1978 I published a book of poems about life as a gastarbeiter, in a magazine called Ochre. One of the editors forwarded me an extract from a letter (30/3/79) from Lee Harwood: "I was immensely moved by the work, more moved by a poem than I have been for ages. It's all quite stunning - to read work which comes out of such a real necessity (Olson's old insistence, and more), and in which it's as though the writer's whole life is laid out there, but laid out not as mere autobiography, personal catharsis, but as a force that also affects others. A work of art in the best sense of that phrase. And such a great and deep pleasure and excitement to read a text that's talking about something that really matters, something that has this firm human base." Yes, well, it was all downhill from there. Thanks, L...
Read more