Blackout Poetry

Dr. Johnson found them 'ingenious and diverting'; Horace Walpole wrote to a friend that he had 'laughed over them till he cried'; Oliver Goldsmith is reported to have felt that 'it would have given him more pleasure to be the author of them than all the works he had ever published of his own.'

I’m talking about the works of one Caleb Whitefoord who published his own alterations of the newspapers of the day under the pseudonym of Papyrius Cursor. Apparently a play on the name Lucius Papirius Cursor. (Don’t ask).

Caleb Whitefoord, portrait by Sir Joshua Reynolds

By those who know about these things, this was a new literary form based on the recycling of lines from those newspapers. Whitefoord was a wine-merchant, poet and diplomat and in 1766 published in The Public Advertiser an article entitled A New Method of Reading Newspapers. He gave this method the name 'cross-reading'. Newspapers of the time were arranged in tight columns with narrow margins. Whitefoord seems to have been the first person to notice that reading lines across the page, instead of downwards, produced some interesting results. Here are a few:

At the meeting at Newcastle, Sir B. F. D. was in the chair—and appeared like a dull, faint nebulous star.

We learn from Berlin, that his majesty—Was convicted of debasing the current coin.

Notwithstanding the present exorbitant price of candles—Some dark transactions will soon be brought to light.

In 2012 Austin Kleon published Steal Like An Artist and is well-known for specific blackout poetry using newspapers. According to his website, it all started with Caleb.

Bear with me here for a bit. This is a poem by Emily Dickinson:

The harm of Years is on him —
The infamy of Time —
Depose him like a Fashion
And give Dominion room.

Forget his Morning Forces —
The Glory of Decay
Is a minuter Pageant
Than least Vitality.

However, it seems to be a little known fact that before that poem was written her cousin Emmet Lee Dickinson (a third cousin, twice removed, by her) wrote the poem at the end of this piece.

He had spent the afternoon drinking a few too many corn whiskeys (his favourite libation) at the popular Washerst (a town in Pennsylvania) watering hole, ‘Meter Here – The Bar for Poets’. He blacked out, woke up at the brothel run by Abigail Well-Barnwell (known to Washerstians as ‘Downton Abbey’) and wrote the poem. His poem, in turn, inspired third cousin Emily to write ‘The harm of years is on him’.

For confirmation of this fact you could do worse than visit The Emmett Lee Dickinson Museum (above the coin-op Laundromat Dickinson Boulevard in Washerst). It opened its doors in 1962 with the sole purpose of preserving and promoting his work and they claim that Emmett created a different form of Blackout Poetry, the kind where a poet drinks a bit too much, blacks out and then ‘comes to’ later with a poem he envisioned during his blackout.

This is a link to the site: https://www.thedickinson.net/  and here below is the poem:

The harm of beers is on him –
The infamy of wine –
Unsteadies him in fashion
That his Gait is not straight line.

Forget how many Courses
That turned his state to Stewed –
In one just Happy Hour
Tasted liquors strongly brewed.

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.

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The Language Of Yellow

There are many types of languages. These structured communications can be visual, written or spoken.  Language conveys meaning, and in some cases, feeling.  Colour is one element artists and poets have readily on hand. Amazingly, there are millions of colours that the human eye can detect including variations of yellow. Yellow is one of three primary colours sitting somewhere between orange and green.

Colour Wheel

The Theory and Practice of Color - Bonnie E. Snow, Hugo B. Froehlich

(Laidlaw Brothers, 1920)

The word yellow is derived from the Old English geolu meaning … yellow. However, my idea of yellow may not be exactly your idea of yellow. To clarify, we need further description and thus, there is sunny, lemon, mustard, dandelion, corn, flaxen, marigold – the list goes on.  Different kinds of yellow conjure up different types of imagery.

Throughout the ages, this bright and often bold colour varying in hue and intensity has grabbed attention, indicated danger and soothed the soul. It has warmed our hearts and homes. It has given atmosphere to paintings along with making serious fashion statements. Sir Herbert James Gunn’s Pauline in the Yellow Dress is a good example.

Here the artist has used the yellow dress to give focus to the subject and also to show that the sitter, his wife, is a self-assured woman. It takes confidence to wear such a dress, she is meant to be seen. No wallflower is she.

Pauline in the Yellow Dress
Herbert James Gunn, 1944, oil on canvas
Harris Museum, Art Gallery & Library Collection

Van Gogh also had an affinity for the colour yellow. He even lived for a time in a yellow house. He created five artworks focusing on sunflowers. These works hang on walls but hardly sink into a background. According to the Van Gogh Museum website, all of these canvases were painted in only three shades of yellow in order to demonstrate ‘that it was possible to create an image with numerous variations of a single colour without any loss of eloquence.’

Sunflowers
Vincent Van Gogh, 1889, oil on canvas
Van Gogh Museum Collection

The Yellow House
Vincent Van Gogh, 1888, oil on canvas
Van Gogh Museum Collection

For those who paint with words as poets do, yellow also provides eye-catching imagery that in one’s mind can be sweetly tasted, make mouths pucker or feel warmth of light  i.e. ‘banana’, ‘lemon’ and ‘sun’. Here is a delightful mixture of poetry with references to yellow and other colours.

XXXI

Nature rarer uses yellow
    Than another hue;
Saves she all of that for sunsets,--
    Prodigal of blue,

Spending scarlet like a woman,
    Yellow she affords
Only scantly and selectly,
    Like a lover's words.

Emily Dickinson


Symphony in Yellow

An omnibus across the bridge
Crawls like a yellow butterfly
And, here and there, a passer-by
Shows like a little restless midge.

Big barges full of yellow hay
Are moored against the shadowy wharf,
And, like a yellow silken scarf,
The thick fog hangs along the quay.

The yellow leaves begin to fade
And flutter from the Temple elms,
And at my feet the pale green Thames
Lies like a rod of rippled jade.

Oscar Wilde


Pelican Chorus (An Excerpt)
King and Queen of the Pelicans we;
No other Birds so grand we see!
None but we have feet like fins!
With lovely leathery throats and chins!

Ploffskin, Pluffskin, Pelican jee!
We think no Birds so happy as we!
Plumpskin, Ploshkin, Pelican jill!
We think so then, and we thought so still!

We live on the Nile. The Nile we love.
By night we sleep on the cliffs above;
By day we fish, and at eve we stand
On long bare islands of yellow sand.

And when the sun sinks slowly down
And the great rock walls grow dark and brown,
Where the purple river rolls fast and dim
And the Ivory Ibis starlike skim

Edward Lear

And here’s a bit of my own drawing and writing this week…

Yellow
Kate Eggleston-Wirtz, 2021
Pen and Ohuhu marker on Paper

Colour Wheel
Cheery is the colour yellow
Warm and glowing - pleasant fellow
Brush with death the colour blue
A sad and melancholy hue

The colour yellow is the one
So full of life - so full of fun
Playful, happy then we have
The colour blue whose face is grave

Now blue upon the other hand
Could be the sea upon the sand
Where blue and yellow like to meet
In calm or stormy tidal beat

Dance together - intermingle
Back and forth amongst the shingle

Till sun says to rest into the night
Artist waking, turns on the light

Meet again on painter’s palette
Mixed emotions brushed beget
Envy – hope - blooming buds in spring
The sky, the earth and everything

Kate Eggleston-Wirtz


Thank you for taking the time to read, Kate 🌞 

https://artuk.org/discover/artworks/pauline-in-the-yellow-dress-152128 accessed 16 January 2021

 https://www.vangoghmuseum.nl/en/collection/s0031V1962  accessed 13 Jan 2021 

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Volcano - Shout at a teacher.

Volcanoes are extinct in the United Kingdom. The last activity I can find took place off the County Antrim coast in Northern Ireland about sixty million years ago. Described as an intense eruption, the after-event gave us the vast collection of hexagonal basalt columns named Giant’s Causeway. And that was it until both my children, at separate times, reached Year 7 Science homework.

The task was to construct a mountain from papier mache and demonstrate an active volcano by mixing the correct amounts of vinegar and baking soda in a suitable vessel placed in the open centre of the mountain.

Child Number One, academically gifted, refused point blank to waste time doing baby-work building a mountain, but understood the chemistry and was happy enough to experiment and get the volcanic mix right. At my most diplomatic, I tried to explain the situation to a non-listening science teacher whose lack of interest was rude, to say the least. My reaction, when my patience ran out, was scarily close to a volcanic eruption. Not for the first time and certainly not the last, I wished this child had agreed to my choice of school, where I couldn’t imagine ever having to shout down a corridor at a teacher’s back.

Four years later and Child Number Two, enjoying the creative aspect of the task, built a remarkable papier mache mountain that we thought would never, ever dry out in time to be painted. Luckily, the dampness didn’t spoil the effect. It looked really impressive with various shades of grey merging into black for shadows and silver for definition with lots of brown and green at ground-level. This artwork, which had taken time and thought was ruined by the erupting volcano, resulting in a very upset child mopping up fizzing, colourful streams. The perfect experiment was of no consolation.

 

My choice of poem is A Still Volcano Life  by Emily Dickinson

 

A still – Volcano – Life -

     That flickered in the night -
     When it was dark enough to do
     Without erasing sight -
 

A quiet – Earthquake Style -

     Too subtle to suspect
     By natures this side Naples –
     The North cannot detect

The Solemn – Torrid – Symbol –

     The lips that never lie –
     Whose hissing Corals part – and shut –
     And Cities – ooze away –

 

Thanks for reading, Pam x

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Call me Dr Phil

Endorphins are the body's own opiates.  They are released during prolonged exercise, periods of relaxation or after overexposure to light.  Subjecting onself to intense pain or pleasure will also bring this happy substance into the blood stream.

The word endorphin comes from endo, which means within, and morphine, which has its root in the Greek Morpheus - the god of dreams.  So endorphins could be said to create a dreamlike state of bliss.  

Did you ever have a pain that felt like it could be fixed by inserting a needle into the ache (this blogger is not advocating the insertion of needles into flesh)?  That'd be a way of intensifying the pain to release endorphins and deaden the pain signals.  Likewise, did you ever eat a massive cake when your heart ached (this blogger absolutely advocates the insertion of massive cakes into mouths)?  That'd be a way of intensifying the pleasure to release endorphins and hug your heart with pure, snuggly, saturated fat.  Mmmm.

 

Emily Dickinson, the reclusive poet, experienced prolonged periods of melancholia.  Many of her poems explored themes of pain and death.  The poem below encapsulates, I think, the idea of a surge of endorphins, flooding the body and mind, numbing the poet into a safe 'swoon', a sanctuary of dreaming.  

The next time someone rubs your neck or spanks your thighs, consider this.  You are buying into a dream-state.  Willfully, persistently, habitually.  Are you aware whether the pain which you are trying to dispel still exists?

There is a pain - so utter-

Emily Dickinson

There is a pain -- so utter --
It swallows substance up --
Then covers the Abyss with Trance --
So Memory can step
Around -- across -- upon it --
As one within a Swoon --
Goes safely -- where an open eye --
Would drop Him -- Bone by Bone.

With just a jump to the left...Tonight the Dead Good Bloggers find out whether this blog is an award-winning blog.  Whether the dream streams are induced by pain or pleasure matters not.  What is important is that we're diving in and having a splash. 


And then a step to the right...Tonight is also the Red Tent event at the New Continental in Preston.  Seven of the North West's most entertaining female poets will be strutting their stuff in a celebration of all things womanly.  As I was saying, what is important is that we're all getting wet. 

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Doorways to everywhere

By Jacob Silkstone

‘Nature is a Haunted House – but Art – a House that tries to be haunted,’ as Emily Dickinson once wrote (displaying both her customary eloquence and her customary fondness for dashes). It seems reasonable to add that all the best haunted houses are crammed with doorways: trap doors, concealed doors, doors to labyrinthine passages, doors to nowhere at all.

If a poem truly is a house that tries to be haunted, where do the doors lead? I imagine that the space behind the poem is similar to the hallway and the Great Hall in House of Leaves – a space which at first seems easily navigable and then, on further exploration, begins to seem infinite. The doorways opened by a poem frequently lead anywhere and everywhere.

In addition to doorways, haunted houses should also contain echoes, distant voices, voices which come and go and occasionally demand to be heard. T. S. Eliot believed that ‘No poet, no artist of any art, has his [or, presumably, her] complete meaning alone’, and the doorways in a poem often lead to other poems and other poets, until everything seems interconnected. We work in different rooms, but we occupy the same house.

Reading a poem is partly a process of looking for doorways. If I pick a line almost at random (allowing myself to cheat slightly) from one of the collections on my shelf, I come up with ‘You’d tell it by the quicken and the pine...’ from Robin Robertson’s ‘At Roane Head’. ‘Pine’ opens doors to two other poems on the same shelf: a door to the first line of ‘Evangeline’ (‘This is the forest primeval. The murmuring pines and the hemlocks...’), and a door to the ninth of Neruda’s twenty love poems (‘Drunk with pines and long kisses...’, in Merwin’s English translation).

The doors associated with ‘quicken’ are harder (or slower, if you’re in the mood for a laboured pun) to open, but an endnote from Robertson explains that quicken is an alternative name for the rowan, and suddenly the poem seems haunted by itself: the quicken/rowan contains a faint echo of ‘Roane Head’. ‘Echo’ opens a door of its own – a door to Seamus Heaney’s ‘Personal Helicon’, the final poem in Death of a Naturalist, which ends:

... I rhyme

To see myself, to set the darkness echoing.

I wonder whether, sometimes, it’s worth reading to set the darkness echoing. Moving through a poem can be like riding a ghost train (‘ghost train’ echoes too: it’s the title of Sean O’Brien’s fourth collection), passing door after door, always surrounded by the many-voiced dark. Entering the space created by a poem involves putting aside your fear of the unknown and being prepared to try as many doors as possible – even when, initially, they refuse to yield.

Read, explore, see where each poem leads and what each poem tries to be haunted by: if left unobserved, all doorways tend, over time, to disappear.

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