Colour Blind

Actually, to pursue my current theme of found poems, the following poem of mine was published in MsLexia in their Summer/Autumn issue of 2002 ... 

Colour blind

The pyrotechnicienne from Alsace

                          hired for my fireworks party

described afterwards her
                                       favourite explosive device.

Construction:
4 kilo shell
3 kilo shell
2 kilo shell
(compacted into a single projectile).

  Effect:
Red
 fan-
palm
green
parasol
vermilion
nightflowering
chrysanthemum

As she said,

                                                  not without remorse,

“This is a spectacle I shall never see
                            for my own pleasure

because when I light the fuse I am stranded directly beneath,

              yet someone once thanked me and

                                             asked if I would be kind enough
to hang
another chandelier
   in the void.”

Poésie trouvée ... the unsought text

Talking of poems composed from found objects, the following is practically poésie trouvée insofar as the text fell nigh fully formed into my lap unsought ...

The Poetess Attempts to Eulogise
a Wonder of Nature
in a Lightning Storm

A peculiar feature as to a lightning-stroke
is its photographic properties.

In this connection a poetess
of twenty-two years,
while climbing a tree to eulogise a bird in its nest,
was struck by lightning
and afterwards showed upon her breast
a picture of the tree,
with the nest upon one of its branches. 

This theory of lightning-photographs
of neighbouring objects on the skin
has probably arisen
from the resemblance of the burns to natural subjects
due to the ramifications of the blood-vessels
as conductors,
or to peculiar electric movements
which can be demonstrated by
positive charges on powdered moss spores.

After her accident, the poetess
wrote no other verses
since, as she remarked, there
could be no more vital poetry
than that written on her breast.

Catherine Eisner, 'Ambit' magazine, Issue 198, Autumn 2009. 

(The gestation of a poem as a critical plot twist is a subject explored more than once in my fiction.)

For a critical plot twist, see also remarks on Nabokov’s The Gift, here  . ..
http://catherineeisnerfrance.blogspot.co.uk/2017/03/did-someone-call-for-recitation.html

Commoners' Rights to the Heroic Quatrain

I wonder who remembers now Kingsley Amis's reactionism* in citing Gray's Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard as 'a great Rightie poem; no work of literature ever argued more persuasively that the poor and ignorant are better off as they are.'

So that's all right, then, 'some mute inglorious' Mr Milton or Mrs Milton are better off laid to rest with our dismissive thought that no lyrical utterance ever passed those illiterate villagers' lips in their lifetime, or profound or original observation ever struck their minds! Absurd!

I was reminded of Amis's idiotic snidery when I came across this poem by David Sweetman the other day. This is the truest, purest, refutation I have yet encountered of Amis's fascistic authoritarian contempt for the People, literate or otherwise, and of his 'kingsley' assumption that metaphor and simile do not figure in the spiritual lives of ALL subjects of the realm.


Cold Beds

Thirty years she had waited for disaster
and when they told her he had drowned
she nodded. Like things seen in Holy prints

there had been signs: the greengrocer
piling bound asparagus as if to burn a saint
made her cross herself quickly.

And when she took flowers for Bob
a dead gull lay on the boy's grave,
plump and grey as the shell that killed him.

So now the father’s gone, after thirty years
on a bed too big for one, she sees it all:
the sails becalmed at the window,

her Madonna for a prow, the moonlight
that gives their walnut cupboard the pattern
of waves closing over his head.

David Sweetman
From ‘Looking into the Deep End’ (Faber, 1981)

* For Amis’s shamefully reactionary remarks, see page 320, ‘The Amis Anthology: A Personal Choice of English Verse’ (1988)

Phantom Words 3 : Tatters / Smoulderings

I did not think I would stumble over an answer so swiftly when I wrote, at the beginning of September, ‘Another phantom word that also demonstrates the English language to be wanting is a label for that particular cobwebby flake-like ember that floats on air currents above a bonfire. It’s not ash or a cinder or exactly a smut. It could be a “floater”, like those shadows on the retina. Now this floating ember is a quite specific phenomenon, yet the word for it has floated out of my reach ... and it's a minor frustration that, if unresolved, could lead to an unhealthy degree of obsessiveness.’

Then.

The image of a burning flag occurred to me, And surely ‘smouldering tatters’ (shreds of cloth, newspaper, wood fibre, etc.) provides the correlative image.

Example: Outside the looted embassy its flag was burned by rebels until only smouldering tatters floated across the square.

P.S. (28-09-11) Is this too simple a solution now I wonder?
A gerundive answer now occurs to me when we learn that a 'smouldering' could be a noun. Should we revise our example, then?

Example 2: Outside the looted embassy its flag was burned by rebels until only tattered smoulderings floated across the square.

Fishingstead!

Yes. After considered thought, I believe I have found a loose term that answers the need for a word to stand in place of ‘fishing village’ (either marine or riverine).

It is cognate with roadstead (a sheltered stretch of water for boats) but suggests greater permanence of place (‘stead’).

Fishingstead.

Example: ‘There’s a little fishingstead down the cliff path in the cove, just a few cottages and boatyard.’

Listen Close to Me

Listen Close to Me

PUBLISHER’S ANNOUNCEMENT :
Subtitled Hidden Lives of Love, Madness, Murder, Loss and Deception, this new collection by Catherine Eisner traces often with darkest black humour the misadventures and behavioural tics of women driven by bizarre and sometimes criminal compulsions. An asexual niece becomes the love interest of her erotica-collecting uncle; the mistress of an army Intelligence Officer assumes the modus operandi of a spy to outwit her lover; a cat-obsessed wife of a commodities broker is suckered into a human-trafficking scam in Hong Kong; an eighteen-year-old governess becomes a suspect in a notorious case of serial murder and begins to harbour suspicions about the budding sociopath in her charge, a sinister nine-year-old boy [extract below]. These are tales that probe the intimate lives and crimes of unreliable narrators to prompt disturbing confidences told in voices from the sidelines that we wouldn’t normally hear.

... A meticulous recorder of behaviour, pitch-perfect on accents and the faultlines between class, sex and age, Eisner imbues each account with an unsettling verisimilitude that reaches its peak in “An Unreined Mind”. An 18-year-old governess struggles to comprehend her nine-year-old charge ... on an isolated country estate ... When a series of murders begins, the governess falls under suspicion … Eisner shows the workings of a highly original mind.
(Review by Cathi Unsworth in The Guardian.)

... entertaining and finely spiced …
(Times Literary Supplement)

Extraordinary writing. Mesmeric reading.
(Ambit magazine)

Paperback: 256 pages
Publisher: Salt Publishing (15 Sep 2011)
ISBN-10: 184471831X
ISBN-13: 978-1844718313


Extract from An Unreined Mind

Seeing him again after all these years, as he was led out of the Crown courtroom after the verdict, flanked by an armed police escort, I was somehow neither surprised by his notoriety nor amazed by my own prophecy fulfilled.
Because, after all, hadn’t his own governess murmured to herself with a shudder, when Skinner was no more than nine years old, ‘Well, that settles his place in history!’ as the boy perched on the wall of his reclusive animals’ graveyard and owlishly watched the hay rick burn while his squealing mice suffocated in their cages.
‘If it’s nae ane thing efter anither wi’ tha’ wickit wee daftie,’ the housekeeper squawked, wildly beckoning to me before the wind could carry the smoke and smuts to descend on her washing line.
Not that Nessie could hear those caged death throes from the haystack. She was stone deaf, and her plangent speech was oddly intonated.
‘Uch! Tha’ wretchit Pish-a-Bed cannae be dealt wi’!’ she screeched, pointing to indissoluble traces of yellowish stains on one draw-sheet.
I helped her fold the batch of single flannelette sheets the boy had brought back from boarding school; each one carried a woven name-tape:

H. L. Skinner.

Looking down at us from that distant grave-mound, the boy was now half hidden behind the iron-fenced enclosure, hands clutched upon railings, insolently sucking a sweet.
‘A’wa wi’ ye!’ Nessie screeched, and brandished a raw fist. ‘Back tae the stank ye wis spawned in! Behind bars! That’s whaur ye belong!’
Of course, whenever criminologists cite Skinner’s name, those gruesome serial killings over three decades will always come to mind; a notoriety that will be forever associated with the Skinner Principle (SP5), the five well-known signifiers of homicidal sociopathy which even today socio-psychologists still consider to be the essential ‘quintad’ for identifying in children first-rank personality disorders predictive of future criminal behaviour.
‘Cruikit weans oot o’ thair raison!’
For Nessie Macmurtagher, such wilful children were unmistakable. And any child so labelled – in her own maledictory words – was likely to be possessed by ‘a demon soul blacker than the Earl of Hell’s waistkit.’
As you’re no doubt aware, these components of the SP5 homicidal sociopathic personality consist of Enuresis (bedwetting), Pyromania (firesetting), Zoosadism (torturing pets and small animals), Necromania (a morbid attraction to dead bodies), and Zootomy (dissection of animal cadavers).
‘Well, that settles his place in history!’ I whispered to myself for, indeed, it was I who was that hired governess or, rather, since at that time I was myself little more than twice the boy’s age, it would be truthfuller to describe the eighteen-year-old factotum who drifted into Skinner’s warped childhood at that critical moment in his life as a sort of immature Universal Aunt.

•

It happened like this.
On the chill wintry evening I consider the Opening Act of the Skinner morality play – in fact, it was the first day of the boy’s Christmas holidays – I was ascending that very same grave-mound in search of my truant charge when, through the gloom, I discerned a bulky figure . . .

Phantom Words / Needed Words

I have recently pursued a modest etymological quest to determine whether other languages can trounce English in certain moods.

I'm sketching out an article on 'phantom words', which is intended to touch upon the principles of those Society for Pure English tracts I've filed somewhere in my attic (I'm sure I have a copy of 'Needed Words', SPE Tract No. XXXI, 1928).

Annoyingly, I've stumbled at the first hurdle in my search for a much needed word for a small fishing village (marine or riverine). As I see it there isn't one; which demonstrates the paucity of the English lexicon. My proposal of portlet doesn't satisfy this want, I agree. (That is, I am not sure this word to denote a smaller or lesser kind of port, following the pattern of booklet, starlet, etc., conveys the proper sense, since, OK, portlet is a familiar computing term.) So the problem remains.  Unless, one accepts 'haven' as a sort of hamlet-sized settlement. Maybe a more pictorial word exists in another language. 'Fishing village' always strikes me as a desperately banal construction, like 'cooking pot'. (And wharf or quay suggest structures rather than a settlement.)

Another phantom word that also demonstrates the English language to be wanting is a label for that particular cobwebby flake-like ember that floats on air currents above a bonfire. It's not ash or a cinder or exactly a smut. It could be a 'floater', like those shadows on the retina. Now this floating ember is a quite specific phenomenon, yet the word for it has floated out of my reach ... and it's a minor frustration that, if unresolved, could lead to an unhealthy degree of obsessiveness.