Weeds and Poetry, Part One

There are ways that weeds resemble poetry.  In Ronald Blythe's A Year at Bottengoms Farm, he describes a picnic for bluebell viewing and his delight in seeing "banks of alkanet, a plant of absolute blue, though despised - 'You can't get rid of it'!"

Exactly.  It's absolute blue and you can't get rid of it. 

Blythe is disappointed in this attitude and tries someone else: "'Look,' I said, turning to my fellow sandwich-eater. 'Alkanet.' 'You can't get rid of it,' she replied."

Alkanet is Arabic for henna, he notes, and wonders if that abtruse information would change her attitude.  Hardly, he says.  "There is no more severe sheep and goats ruling than that which defines the acceptable and the non-acceptable flower" (and one definition of a weed is a flower in a place where it isn't wanted).  He then makes a slightly self-mocking flourish of praise to Pentaglottis sempervirens to end his short essay.

Pentaglottis sempervirens, says Wikipedia, is known as green alkanet because it is evergreen but has brilliant blue flowers; it's a member of the borage family but the useful member, also called Alkanet is Alkanna tinctoria, the source of a red dye; this is the plant most commonly called simply "alkanet." http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alkanna_tinctoria

So perhaps that's another resemblance?  Looks to be useful but then isn't?

Anyway, this reminded me of Bashō's comments about poetry in his Records of a Travel-Worn Satchel.    He describes having "a wind-swept spirit, for lack of a better name, for it is much like a thin drapery that is torn and swept away at the slightest stir of the wind."  If "having" is the word since he makes a distance between himself and it.

He talks about how poetry began innocently and casually as an amusement and then became an addiction which didn't give this spirit any rest: "ever since it began to write poetry, it has never found peace with itself, always wavering between doubts of one kinds and another."  

It may seem he is blaming poetry for this but it isn't that.  It's more that poetry creates too much sweeping away.  

He talks about the spirit's need for security, perhaps by taking service at a court and the need to be established in another sense by becoming a scholar.  

He talks about the way writing poetry could make the spirit dejected (presumably because his work was so poor compared to what he hoped for) or could make the spirit vain and egotistical when the work seemed to be better than the work of others (the ugly temptation!).  Two dilemmas that fling the thin curtain around and that might suggest why he was tempted (or it was tempted) by the thought of security as a form of emotional stability. 

The passage ends with what seems a noble conclusion. One that he promptly undercuts.  

He begins by saying the spirit's "unquenchable love of poetry" kept it from pursuing security in either of those other forms and then immediately pulls the rug out from under: "The fact is, it knows no other art than the art of writing poetry, and therefore it hangs onto it more or less blindly." 

In other words: absolute blue, can't get rid of it.

Blythe, Ronald. 2006. A year at Bottengoms farm. Norwich: Canterbury.

Matsuo, Bashō. 1966. The narrow road to the Deep North: and other travel sketches. Harmondsworth: Penguin. trans. Nobuyuki Yuasa

  

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Overblijvende_ossentong_Pentaglottis_sempervirens_closeup.jpg 

Cautionary Tale Read On Accents MP3

Cautionary Tale Read On Accents MP3

Something from the new chapbook You Won't Need That read on the radio show "Accents" (WRFL 88.1).  First published in Raritan.

Translation read on Accents MP3

Translation read on Accents MP3

Something from the new chapbook, You Won't Need That (Willow Springs), read on the radio show "Accents" (WRFL 88.1).

What Next Read On Accents MP3

What Next Read On Accents MP3

Here's a poem from The Beautiful City of Weeds, read on the radio show "Accents" (WRFL 88.1).

On the Cloud Interview and Reading

Another reason to be careful while surfing the web....

https://soundcloud.com/crescenthillradio/ignite-the-ink-04-27-13-robert

https://soundcloud.com/crescenthillradio

Sonja DeVries was kind enough to interview me and have me read on her radio show --
"Ignite the Ink" on the Crescent Hill community station in Louisville.  That's the link up above.  I go on and on of course...being crazed with words...but it isn't too nauseating.

Naturally there is a tendency to babble if you hide away to scribble and dislike talking about work in progress like I do (being deeply superstitious about the dangers in doing that...seems to bring a canker or mildew to the draft and kill it dead).  So being interviewed might be the first time in 8 - 10 years to talk about the pieces and just like any castaway you are wild-eyed and need three or four mouths to be able to say everything that has to be said right now.

I read some new things, a few from the chapbook and one from Beautiful City.  She was a great listener and asked some hard/interesting questions about the fundamental things that were fun to try to answer though I doubt I came close.  Climbed on, got bucked off again immediately, ended up covered with dust but pleased to have been in the ring.

re Denis Wood, Everything Sings

What I'm reading

Denis Wood, Everything Sings: Maps for a Narrative Atlas (Siglio Press, Los Angeles, 2010) $28

Yes! 

That would be the brief yet exhaustively thorough review of this great thing, or rather what the author calls a "process-thing." 

I could slow down and say, well, what I like is...in fact I will slow down and say that what I like is...

That he insists on what other cartographers leave out. He cites John Cage's amused discovery that no matter what he did to randomize and remove the controlling human hand from his musical activity, there would still be melody at times.  

DW insists that the same goes for what pretends to be merely instrumental or objective:

Those objects still sing.  

In other words, narrative is inescapable.  Mapmakers, as he says or perhaps rants/sings in his interesting and enthusiastic (in the Whitman sense) introduction, try to make a map as merely a set of directions.

Yet sneakily they imply that this map, this set of official lines and numbers and names, is all that is the case.  The map shows what there is.  The rest is not relevant. 

DW says, o no, not so fast, the rest is everything and not only that, everything is singing.

Essentially he maps not a neighborhood as a set of streets but a neighborhood as the experience of the people who live there, in accordance with his theory that a place is not just a place, that people and place together transform each other. 

So there are hilarious and sweet "maps" of things that don't ever get mapped like a color density and shade map of the neighborhood in autumn that is a word cloud of color names. 

And also serious reminders of the political and economic forces and artifacts -- restrictive covenants, for example -- that give a neighborhood its shape and look and flavor.  

A wonderful book/ process-thing....In the same way that DW says a neighborhood is a "process-thing" (not just a thing-thing, a silent motionless object) that transforms anywhere into here and here into everywhere, his book transforms person plus pages covered with stuff into something more interesting or at least something smiling with delight, if not actually singing, since it could be early in the morning and besides the birds are taking care of it here in South Frankfort right this minute. 

If all books were this good, I would use my secret powers to stop time so I could read books forever without either of us -- me or the books -- disintegrating. 

Obscure Musical Facts of Mild Interest

I can call myself a songwriter officially because --  as with some other very old professions -- I get paid for it.  Curious persons can check out my stuff --  the cut and the as-yet uncut -- here: www.bobgregory.net 

Another route which skips the uncut is to check out Jim Hurst's website:  http://www.jimhurst.com/fr_home.cfm

Fans of amazing guitar have already done that, I'm guessing.  He comes out of bluegrass and country but his ears are wide open to other things and you can hear other styles and traditions blended into what he does. You won't be able to predict what he might play next but none of it is showy or random either.  Beautiful singable lines always.  You can tell that by his vocals as well.

He's done tunes of mine on two of his cds: 

Box of Chocolates




Intrepid -- the latest



Despite my tunes being on them, they're well worth checking out.