Barking At The Moon

Hot on the heels of last week's cat blog, this week's dog blog. Prompted by listening to Mark Grist recite a poem about his happy hound on Blackpool Promenade the other night (as part of National Poetry Day), I thought I'd give a canine spin to this moon theme. I've done a bit of research into the story of the first dog in space and I've crafted today's poem on the back of that.

Blackpool (along with many other towns, I'm sure) has been awash with posters, stickers, buttons and events this week celebrating National Poetry Day - "dream like a poet", "love like a poet", "speak like a poet", "think like a poet" etc; (I didn't spot any that read "starve like a poet").  As T.S. Eliot once remarked in his essay about the Metaphysical Poets, we artists/authors/poets have the pleasant duty to both entertain and educate - and we do it for love. I hope these Dead Good Blogs go some way to living up to that duty. Barking at the moon, then...

Laika (apparently her name means Barking in Russian) achieved a dubious but lasting fame as the first animal to go into earth orbit, when Sputnik 2 blasted off from the Baikonur Cosmodrome to celebrate the 40th anniversary of the Bolshevik Revolution in November 1957. President Kruschev was eager to prove to the world that the Soviet Union led the way in the space race. Laika, part husky, part Samoyed terrier, had been picked up as a stray wandering the Moscow streets. (I was there a few times in 2010 and 2011 and packs of stray dogs still roam the city.) The Soviet scientists of the Sputnik programme chose strays because they reasoned such animals had demonstrated great endurance to survive the extreme cold and deprivation of Moscow winters.

 

Laika was one of three rounded-up hounds trained for the Sputnik launch; (the others were Albina and Mushka). To prepare them for their journey into space, the dogs were transferred to progressively smaller cages over a three-week period to get them used to extreme confinement; they were also regularly spun in centrifuge machines and exposed to high volume recordings of jet engines, both of which simulated the acceleration and thunderous noise of a rocket launch. Finally they had to be trained to eat the special high-nutrition gel that would be their food in space. Laika was chosen to be the flight dog as she was the least excitable of the three. Days before the launch, one of the scientists took her home to play with his children: "I wanted to do something nice for Laika. She had so little time left to live."

 

Just prior to lift-off on November 3rd 1957, Laika's fur was sponged with a weak alcohol solution and carefully groomed. She was harnessed and painted with iodine on those areas where sensors were to be attached. She was then wired up, secured in her capsule, a container in which she could stand or sit but couldn't turn round. The technicians kissed her nose and wished her luck before closing and securing the hatch.

Telemetry from Sputnik 2 suggested that Laika's respiratory rate quadrupled during the stress of lift-off and her heart rate increased from 100 to 240 beats per minute. Once in orbit and weightless, after about 3 hours these functions had gradually returned to normal levels. However, the thermal insulation on the spacecraft had malfunctioned shortly after lift-off and the capsule temperature rapidly soared to over 40C, so that the first dog in space expired just six hours into her voyage from overheating. Five months later, in April 1958 after 2,570 orbits of the Earth Sputnik 2, including Laika's remains, disintegrated during re-entry to the atmosphere.

Laika

Moon
I've been observing you carefully for quite some while.
You brighten the sky
but don't burn like the sun.
Did you ever see me with your great silver eye?
Did you hear me barking to you
when you rose majestic over the city at night?

Life is hard enough here
and though I'll never complain
I have dreams of you, moon.
As I watched the Moscow river
slowly freeze over again
I did think how fine it would be
to scamper on your surface,
kick up moondust with abandon,
leap ten feet into the air
with every joyful stride,
chase my tail for happiness,
running free,
maybe find a moondog for a friend,
bury bones for all eternity.

Could it be
that dreams come true?
Plucked from the streets,
it seems I am the chosen one,
trained now and readied
to rocket to the skies.

I do not howl from fear
as other dogs do.
I am through with barking.
Instead, I'm waiting on a great adventure,
tense in this darkest hour before the dawn,
quivering with anticipation,
tingling to my tail
from a kindly kiss upon the nose.

Stars guide me home.
Beyond your sparkling curtain
is the promise of a better tomorrow.
5-4-3-2-1...

Thanks for reading. Have a good week, S ;-)

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Den of Thieves

Illumination.   


Light bulb.  


Guiding light.

Dazzling mind.

The fire inside.


Sparks.  Arcs.

Heat.  Neat.




It's National Poetry Day.  The theme is water.  Water and electricity don't mix. 

If education is electricity, business is water.



Extinguished.


Dampened voices.  Drowned out.

Dim.

Washed up.  Foggy.

Wasted.


SWIM.

Image from www.timeshighereducation.co.uk

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Truth is the daughter of time, not of authority

Words of wisdom come at you from the strangest of places.  Back in the days of yore when I was training to be a nurse (no I didn't complete it and I don't want to look at your rash) we were told that the source most people trusted for health advice was their friends and family.  If you have the aforementioned rash do you go straight to the GP or do you get someone else to look at it first?  Now admittedly these days Google has taken over as the 'go to' place for immediate advice but there's nothing quite like whipping it out for a friend and waiting for them to politely ask you to show them again when you get out of the supermarket.

As the naked emporer discovered, wisdom does not require age, experience or knowledge.  The title of today's blog suggests that wisdom requires time but this is not necessarily the case.  A child is just as likely to make a meaningful observation as an elder.  Perhaps more so as they lack the myriad of, sometimes meaningless, associations which can cloud an adult's perception.

On National Poetry Day, I joined Jamie Field at the Southbank Centre for readings by, among others, Roger McGough and Grace Nichols.  The majority of the audience consisted of teenagers in school uniforms who had come to cheer on their classmates.  Ira Lightman, along with several other brilliant poets, had spent time in schools working with these teens on poetry for the Peace Camp Project and some of them were brave enough to stand up in front of an audience of about 350 people and read their work.  They did so confidently and seriously.  The performances were punctuated by loud cheers from their colleagues.

Some of the poetry they wrote with Ira can be read here.  I am particularly fond of this one:

PEOPLE

I like you but
only when I feel like it,
love you
only sometimes.

The students went on to produce sculptural lockets for the poetry with artist Bethan Maddocks and theatre designer Verity Quinn. If you were looking for a wise way of spreading your words, this has to be worth a try.

You can find more poetry by high school students on the Poetry Zone website.  If you have a young poet in your life (or you fancy yourself as a young poet), send them across to the Young Poets' Network. It has writing challenges, poetry maps, games and a strong community of budding poets.

My meta-wisdom: if you want to be wise, stop thinking.  Throw away the years, make yourself small, forget what you think you know.  Listen.  Turn off the television, go for a walk.  Stand in a bus stop at 8.15 or 3.30pm.  Listen.  Sit on a bench in a skate park.  Listen. 

Teens are sharing wisdom all the time (or so my phone bill tells me) but we seldom give them a platform.  Perhaps that's why they shout.

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POKE (poetry and smoke)

by Vicky Ellis

 [Note from Ash: Vicky is away from her PC today. She's in London for National Poetry Day experiencing the companionship of poetic greats such as Roger McGough, Grace Nichols and Jamie Field. She's sending her blog content through in small bursts and I'll be updating them throughout the day. Please keep checking back for further updates.]

Fat, broken frog,
its insides a string of pearls,
lunar glisten on mottled pavement.
An explosion of belly.
Heavy boot?
Bicycle?
Dropped from the sky?
 Long fingers reaching up dramatically,
legs splayed indecently,
a ripper victim beseeching the clouds to cleanse its past.

New body - water
dropped over months and
now the fields mirror the clouds which
bore them.
Vain sky.
A crane crouches,
sulking at the soft jawline of her powdered visage.
How do the fish travel to new water?
How does the bird know when they've arrived?

Cat.
Tiny in an
expanse of grass and lake.
Beneath a hedgerow, ginger head watches the train.
No houses visible this side of the tracks.
Has it built a home
beneath
the
hawthorn?

Poetry.
An app from the Poetry Foundation. Random
words: spin
to discover
convoluted extractions old and new.
Linh Dinh eats sparrows.
Ish Klein ('No Promissary Note') makes me smile,
a penis in
the opening
line will do that.

Trepidation.
30 minutes to touch down.
The city scares me in the approach. Mass. Congregation.
I want to see
the river today.
When I'm in the country I long
for fences.

The gentleman
on the seat in front
has well oiled skin which stretches
across his dome,
the colour of fat on Jersey milk.
His eyebrows are thick and
grey as the underbelly of clouds.
I see him
in profile.
I guess that his eyes are blue.

He isn't bald. When
leaning forward he revealed a
Patrick Stewart band of silver hair
and frown of flesh
in the centre at the back.
I feels its discontent at my
previous
observation.

Is it all poetry?
What?
Is all this poetry?
Huh?
Are all these books poetry?
It's a poetry library.

John Berryman wrote
prolifically. 3 stanzas
on every page. I hope
his content is more
creative
than the form.

Roger McGough has silver
hair, Grace Nichols
has a gold scarf. Teens know of
love and snow.
Ira rhymes with admirer,
not hearer.
Rachel Rooney thought
day was night
(the cosmic theme confused perhaps).
Heads make better doors
than windows. Phil Jupitus
propped up the bar, beard
in tow.

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HAPPY NATIONAL POETRY DAY!

It's a good job you made it here today. This is a free service aimed at ensuring that nobody is left wanting when the question is asked: "What did you read on National Poetry Day 2011?"

Perhaps it's because I turned it into a (terrible) song but this portion of The Walls Do Not Fall by Hilda Doolittle is one of the few I can recall on demand.

But we fight for life,
we fight, they say, for breath,

so what good are your scribblings?
this - we take them with us

beyond death; Mercury, Hermes, Thoth
invented the script, letters, palette;

the indicated flute or lyre-notes
on papyrus or parchment

are magic, indelibly stamped
on the atmosphere somewhere,

forever; remember, O Sword,
you are the younger brother, the latter-born,

your Triumph, however exultant,
must one day be over,

in the beginning
was the Word.


Hilda Doolittle (1946)


I have always been partial to that phrase: In the beginning was the Word. Most likely this is a throwback to a Catholic upbringing. It reminds me of the church social club on a Sunday afternoon and pestering those around me with the same question again and again: "What is the word?" Of course nobody could tell me what that word was but hearing that phrase convinced me that there was a word, an idea made communicable, that would unlock some essential key to existence. This, in part, is why I write.

Another favourite poem of mine, because Regina Spektor embedded it in a song, is Fevrale by Boris Pasternak:

February. Get ink, shed tears.
Write of it, sob your heart out, sing,
While torrential slush that roars
Burns in the blackness of the spring.

Go hire a buggy. For six grivnas,
Race through the noice of bells and wheels
To where the ink and all your grieving
Is muffled when the rainshower falls.

To where, like pears burnt black as charcoal,
A myriad rooks, plucked from the trees,
Fall down into the puddles, hurl
Dry sadness deep into the eyes.

Below, the wet black earth shows through,
With sudden cries the wind is pitted,
The more haphazard, the more true
The poetry that sobs its heart out.

You can hear it read in Russian here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pf4FQxILI1I

My partner's father has been learning Russian for some time and he assures me that the English translation does not accurately portray the emotions of this poem. Hearing it read in Russian, I have to agree. So much about the way language is used in poetry is about an emotional connection to the words and a feeling for the sounds. It is close to music I think.

The poetry that matters to me is the poetry that forces me to stop. Both of these pieces had the power to do that to me. Ideas flow so easily through the brain when they are familiar. Living by the sea I appreciate how something as spectacular as an ocean can become commonplace when seen every day. Occasionally, however, the light is just right or the wind gentle enough that I remember the vastness of the water, the strength of a single wave. In this analogy poetry is elemental. It is the light or the wind which forces us to stop and notice an ocean; forces us to open our eyes and see something essential.

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