Trial and Error

Trial and error is pretty much the basis for most forms of activity but as this is a site based around poetry let’s stick with the writing of a poem. I don’t know what the ratio of poets starting a new work on a computer screen or with a blank piece of paper, pencil and rubber are, but I’m of the latter persuasion. A4, Lamy mechanical 0.7 mm lead and rubber.

But, obviously, not a choice that could be made a hundred and more years ago, although I’ve just thought of typewriters. Surely not for poems?

Back to the subject. I reckon there are two methods of addressing trial and error. The first is by oneself and the second by an input from another’s perspective. With the presumption that one knows there is an error to be taken care of in the first place. Not necessarily the case.

I’m starting with Walt Whitman, one of my heroes, and his collection entitled ‘Leaves of Grass ’. He self published the first version in 1855 when it contained a mere twelve poems and then spent the rest of his life altering and expanding the collection until he died in 1892, when the collection contained over four hundred poems.

Among the poems in the early Leaves of Grass editions (albeit sometimes under different titles) were "Song of Myself", "Song of the Open Road", "I Sing the Body Electric", "Out of the Cradle Endlessly Rocking", and "Crossing Brooklyn Ferry". Later editions would contain Whitman's elegy to the assassinated President Abraham Lincoln, "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd".

The only known extant manuscript page of the first edition of 'Leaves of Grass ' shows the trial and errors needed to get to this:

The pure contralto sings in the organloft.
The carpenter dresses his plank. . . the tongue of his foreplane whistles its wild ascending lisp,
The married and unmarried children ride home to their Thanksgiving dinner,
The pilot seizes the king-pin, he heaves down with a strong arm, . . .

Walt Whitman and Leaves of Grass revisions

For someone who looked for advice from someone else then it’s hard to escape from the influence of Ezra Pound on T S Eliot and the writing of The Wasteland.

He advised Eliot to cut the original draft of around eight hundred lines to 433 plus he told him to change the title from ‘He Do the Police in Different Voices ’ which came from a Dickens character in 'Our Mutual Friend ' who was noted for his ability to imitate the voices of the police in crime reports. Eliot thought it was brilliant. Pound insisted it was cut.

Here’s an image showing revisions made by Pound and Vivienne, Eliot’s first wife, to The Wasteland's  "On Margate Sands" stanza.

I can connect
Nothing with nothing.
(ll. 300–02)

revisions to Eliot's On Margate Sands stanza in The Wasteland

And in the note accompanying the information it states that "After straining one of his hands rowing while at graduate school, Eliot preferred to write by using a typewriter where possible".

Pound told him to chuck an entire opening section set in a Boston saloon with stuff like:

First we had a couple of feelers down at Tom’s place,
There was old Tom, boiled to the eyes, blind,

and start with this:

I. The Burial of the Dead

April is the cruellest month, breeding
Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing
Memory and desire, stirring
Dull roots with spring rain.
Winter kept us warm, covering
Earth in forgetful snow, feeding
A little life with dried tubers.
Summer surprised us, coming over the Starnbergersee
With a shower of rain; we stopped in the colonnade,
And went on in sunlight, into the Hofgarten,
And drank coffee, and talked for an hour.
Bin gar keine Russin, stamm’ aus Litauen, echt deutsch.
And when we were children, staying at the archduke’s,
My cousin’s, he took me out on a sled,
And I was frightened. He said, Marie,
Marie, hold on tight. And down we went.
In the mountains, there you feel free.
I read, much of the night, and go south in the winter.

TS Eliot and Ezra Pound

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.

Read More

Firsts

There are so many subjects and areas that can be covered by Firsts and that is before it can be narrowed down to the personal. The first humans, your first kiss, the first train, the first time Birmingham City win the FA Cup, but that will be next season so doesn’t count.

I decided after much thought that I’d go with my selection of First discoveries that made a difference to the human race. Not the accidental ones like the use of fire but ones that were as a result of human thought. I was going to try a list of importance but that led to problems so I’m going chronologically.

Cuneiform Script

Writing: I think there is a very strong case to be made for the invention of writing to be the most important of all inventions. Everything else, for humanity, follows on from it. And for that we have to go back to Mesopotamia (where else) in around 3,200 BCE. In southern Iraq there were a series of city states including, for instance, Uruk and at first symbols were inscribed on clay tablets by a reed stylus to show how many goats or beer etc were being counted. That eventually became too cumbersome a system and over only a few years the symbols were modified to create characters representing the sounds of the Sumerian language and consequently other languages. This system is called Cuneiform. Ignore any claims made by Egyptologists.

The Earth is Round: Not an obvious statement from the literal standpoint of a human being. However, in the year 240 BCE a certain Eratosthenes, a Greek citizen from the city of Cyrene (now part of Libya) observed that at noon on the Summer Solstice in Alexandria, the Sun was directly overhead. He knew that in Aswan, about 800 kilometres to the south, the Sun would be at an angle of 7.2 degrees from vertical at the same time. By measuring the angle of the Sun’s rays at both locations and using geometry, Eratosthenes was able to calculate that the Earth had a circumference of about 28,735 miles. This is close to the modern value of 24,850 miles. Apart from the practical advantages from discovering this fact I do feel that this must have been a real psychological jolt to people at the time. I will add to this the first time that it was found that the Earth went round the sun.

Calculating Earth's Circumference

Electromagnetism: the first half of the 19th Century saw an extraordinary growth in the understanding of science and engineering. No one person could claim to have discovered or invented all parts of that growth. Despite what the movies say science doesn’t work like that. But that doesn’t mean that individuals don’t make their mark. In 1831 Michael Faraday discovered electromagnetic induction, the principle behind the electric transformer and generator. This discovery was crucial in allowing electricity to be transformed from a curiosity into a powerful new technology. Electromagnetism quickly started the use of electrical energy production, transformation and distribution, light, heat, and sound production and detection, wireless communication, sensors, computation, electrolysis, electroplating and mechanical motors and actuators etc. And the movies.

Cinema: I’m not sure about this one but it seems to me that although humanity has always made images of themselves the invention of a method to actually see oneself moving and talking from youth to age might have a profound influence on human psychology.

Yuri Gagarin

Space: I can’t not include the first time a human being left the confines of our planet. I vividly remember staying up all night (together with most of humanity) watching the moon landings but the honour of the first person into space belongs to Yuri Gagarin. On April 12, 1961, aboard the spacecraft Vostok 1, he became the first human being to travel into space. During the flight, the 27-year-old test pilot and industrial technician also became the first man to orbit the planet, a feat accomplished by his space capsule in 89 minutes. Vostok 1 orbited Earth at a maximum altitude of 187 miles and was guided entirely by an automatic control system. The only statement attributed to Gagarin during his one hour and 48 minutes in space was, “Flight is proceeding normally; I am well.”

I’m going to stick to a top 5 but I’m sure that others will have a different, but wrong, opinion.

The Four Quartets by T S Eliot

Number 1

Burnt Norton

Time present and time past
Are both perhaps present in time future,
And time future contained in time past.
If all time is eternally present
All time is unredeemable.
What might have been is an abstraction
Remaining a perpetual possibility
Only in a world of speculation.
What might have been and what has been
Point to one end, which is always present.
Footfalls echo in the memory
Down the passage we did not take
Towards the door we never opened
Into the rose-garden. My words echo
Thus, in your mind.
                               But to what purpose
Disturbing the dust on a bowl of rose-leaves
I do not know.

Thanks for reading, Terry Q.

Read More

Nonsense but great fun

I have always loved nonsense poetry. One of the first books that I ever read on my own was The Cat in The Hat. Attracted by the black, white, red and blue colours on the cover, I soon discovered the joys of rhyme and nonsense.

My favourite poem was The Owl and Pussy Cat by Edward Lear. I was fascinated by the strange, mis-matched couple setting out on a voyage with a little money. Precarious craft seem to be a theme close to Lear's heart: The Jumblies went to sea in a sieve. What a wonderfully reckless thing to do - must have been like a white-knuckle ride.  Oh I know that their heads were green and their hands were blue but surely that is no prerequisite to idiocy. I have friends with brightly coloured hair who would never take such risks.

One of the pleasures of being the parent of two young children was passing on my love of literature to formative minds. My son was no great reader. It just didn't take, despite my best effort and futile attempts at bribery. My daughter was far more receptive. We would share a bath each evening and as I washed her hair, I would teach her a few lines of The Owl and The Pussy Cat. Finally she was competent enough to recite the poem in it's entirety. When she finished, I praise and applauded, then she turned to me and stated "But Mummy, pee isn't green!"  I couldn't knock her for not realising the nuances of a homonym.

Of course, Lewis Carroll's stories are peppered with nonsense rhyme. Who could forget The Walrus and the Carpenter. Even TS Eliot employed the nonsense genre in his wonderful Old Possum's Book of Practical Cats. Remember Magical Mr Mistopheles, Rum Tum Tugger and McCafferty - incredible character and fuel for a growing child's vivid imagination.

Like I said, I have always loved nonsense poetry. Now where on earth did I put the Quangle -Wangles Hat?

Edward Lear was also a prolific writer of limericks, here is my tribute.

Nonsense Limerick

Mabel the witch of Montrose,
had a terrible itch on her nose.
When she started to scratch it,
it set off her magic
and transformed it into a rose.

Thanks for reading. Stay safe.  Adele

Read More

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 ;-)

Read More

A Red Card For Corruption

This week's theme is 'Calling A Halt'. Well, there is so much to take exception to - and to want to put a stop to - that your Saturday Blogger could keep typing righteously all through the week-end and beyond. Bankers' bonuses, child abuse, ethnic cleansing, grooming, gun and knife crime, human trafficking and religious fanaticism would be pretty much at the top of a lengthy list, but I decided a few weeks ago that I was going to use this topic to tackle the issue of corruption in the upper echelons of football's governing body and show a red card to FIFA.

Thanks to the FBI (I never thought I would write those words) and the Swiss police, the task of exposing the cynical corruption and greed that is rife within FIFA is already underway. Warrants have been issued, some arrests have been made and no one in the organisation that runs world football should rest easy at night or feel that they are beyond the law. I hope the investigation will be extensive and rigorous and I hope that FIFA will not be entrusted with putting its own discredited house in order. World governments need to align on this issue and invoke the offices of the UN and the International Courts to enforce changes in the constitution, governance and accountability of FIFA and we, the people (and football fans of every hue), need to hold our governments to that task.

I am very pleased that FIFA president Sepp Blatter has stepped down days after he was re-elected. I like the aphorism that states: You don't sweep a staircase clean by starting at the bottom. As head of that self-evidently corrupt organisation, Blatter needed to take responsibility for allowing such immorality in the ranks - a clear sending off offence. It remains to be seen whether he is implicated in anything illegal in addition.

My poem this week is an attempt to open a window into the psyche of Sepp Blatter.  I've written it as an affectionate pastiche of T S Eliot's 'The Love Song Of J. Alfred Prufrock' (from Prufrock  and Other Observations, published 1917). You don't have to be familiar with the original to enjoy my Blattering of Eliot's poem, but I think it will resonate more if you are...

The Attenuated Love Song of J. ‘Sepp’ Blatter

Senza tema d’infamia… 

Let us go then, you and I,

Leave this half-completed stadium

Spread out against the sky,

To purr in limousines

Down dusty half-deserted streets,

The muttering retreats

Of poor exploited workers from Natal,

Arriving in a sweep

Before a luxury five-star hotel

With air-con and an ocean view.

  

Our insidious intent?

Oh, do not ask “What’s in it for us?”

Let us go and make our visit.

  

In the penthouse, women come and go

Offering fellatio.

  

Now is the time to wonder

“Do I dare?”

Time to turn back,

With famous bald spot in the middle of my hair,

My necktie rich and modest,

Conscience clear.

  

But no.

Here’s no great matter. I am J. ‘Sepp’ Blatter,

Meticulous, urbane, most powerful of men,

Shaper and broker of a global game,
I am peerless and immune from blame.

This is my universe. I have the vision.

I have the right to officiate

And I have the right to recreate.

Do not disturb!

  

Negotiate my fee discreetly

And satisfaction will be guaranteed,

A cast-iron decision immune from revision.

Then there will be time

For all the works and pay-days,

Time for you and time for me.

This and so much more -

Wealth and power and glory for us all.

  

Behind the scenes, detectives come and go

Compiling their portfolio.

  

I have seen the moment of my greatness flicker.

I believe my minions start to bicker,

I know the voices lying with a dying fall

In the sunsets and the dooryards;

I have heard reporters snicker

And I’ve bitten off the matter with a smile.

  

However, when I am penned and wriggling

In the hall of justice

Then how should I begin

To defend my days and ways?

Rebut those who presume to accuse?

Full of high sentence, but a bit obtuse,

Should I have the strength to ride the crisis?

  

And will it have been worth it, after all,

To have squeezed the universe into a football,

To be brought in upon a silver platter

To be auctioned to the highest bidder?

  

I am J. ‘Sepp’ Blatter. I grow old.

I shall wear the bottoms of my prison trousers rolled.

I may hear the klaxons and the vuvuzelas singing

Each to each in the favelas

And the football anthems ringing out of reach

But I do not think that they will sing for me.

 

Thanks very much for reading. I'd encourage you to check out Eliot's  original. It's a brilliant poem and you'll find it in most collections of his best writings.

Have a great week, Steve ;-)

Read More