the memories of

... strawberries; are mine as they ripple across the past few summers. so jammy to find them in my inbox, the subway and elsewhere across the city. they expanded outwards (as they usually do) to others and elsewheres; all the same so closely tied to this city.

these are someone else's memories that now extend to mine of strawberries.

The most vivid memory snapshot of him I possess comes from long before then: one Saturday night in Glasgow in the 70s, after the pubs had closed, I boarded a bus heading out west. The upper deck, as always, was a genial riot of drinking songs, Frank Sinatra tunes, Danny Boy and the rest. In the middle of it all, hands clasped on his lap, sat a silently smiling Edwin Morgan. (James Campbell, The Guardian, 20 August 2010)

Edwin George Morgan, poet, born 27 April 1920; died 19 August 2010.

Amongst these words, some of his own. How could it not be the Loch Ness Monster song.

stretch

... to another summer. 2 years back. as i am packing again i'll be sending off my eigg/berlin sketchbook to a fellow student to use the sketchbook for some music composition.

while making tea. sun am. pastel, w/c, pencil in moleskine

it only occurred to me that she could get this sketchbook as alternative to the chile one. so. i am back with summer preparations. again with going to being in berlin for a good part of it. going to be sketching for a good part of it. and glad again to be leaving glasgow for a bit. and yet: so much is vastly different.

i am also back with the malleability of time: how it stretches forwards and backwards. radiates outwards in all direction from any presence. how past and future seem constantly folded into and onto the presence.

a curious one. this relationship to time. and how it is social and the experience seems mostly my own. how far can i stretch forward. and backward. while all is now.

flicking through the eigg sketchbook it was also all about time. lykke li and island time. all in rain and low clouds. all the time.

so,

stretch. while making tea on holidays
a look out of the window
how close is the world today
depends on the mist and the low clouds
is it as far as the dry stone wall?
or can you see the cairn?
or even the high moors?

stretch. the abstracted lines come easy
capture the horizon. a tree or two
but not more
close is far more stretching
what about the stones?
or the bracken? or the sheep.

lucky i was: no sheep in sight today.

i also begun rebuilding my 0kb music library today. some borrowed, some stashed, some carefully saved. so. back to that summer there goes this.

oh. she will get the ghost of time, too. no point in doing things by half.

one art

One Art

The art of losing isn't hard to master;
so many things seem filled with the intent
to be lost that their loss is no disaster,

Lose something every day. Accept the fluster
of lost door keys, the hour badly spent.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

Then practice losing farther, losing faster:
places, and names, and where it was you meant
to travel. None of these will bring disaster.

I lost my mother's watch. And look! my last, or
next-to-last, of three beloved houses went.
The art of losing isn't hard to master.

I lost two cities, lovely ones. And, vaster,
some realms I owned, two rivers, a continent.
I miss them, but it wasn't a disaster.

-- Even losing you (the joking voice, a gesture
I love) I shan't have lied. It's evident
the art of losing's not too hard to master
though it may look like (Write it!) a disaster.

Elizabeth Bishop

so little

when there was time

[placeholder + image]

i thought i'd spare you the whimsical one aka My Ghost of time [6] - rhyming time with mine, involving travel and slowness.

you'll get the picture for it though. and there'll be two more to come [i think]

time there was not

T I M E

Without time

A moment in time

A moment in time and all folds inward

Suddenly it's time

 

He took the time with him

That moment in the stormy sea,

and all time disappeared.

Time for the future                                                                            

time for the past

Simply being in time

with no need for it

no urgency.

That all went with him

Since then there was never any time left.

For Lea Rosen

... für wen sonst?

Who then knows what we will become? That we are is a rumour that we believe as soon as we remember: once I was a child.
But soon the next thing comes, it is too large and runs through us like autumn wind in empty alleyways.
Rilke

Für Lea Rosen

... who else?

Wer weiß denn was wir werden? Daß wir sind, ist ein Gerücht an das wir wieder glauben sooft wir fühlen: ich war einmal ein Kind.
Doch schon das Nächste kommt zu groß und rinnt durch uns wie Wind im Herbst durch leere Lauben.
RM R

... und alle ihre worte sind bewohnt

und alle ihre worte sind bewohnt. und alle ihre worte sind bewohnt. und alle ihre worte sind bewohnt. und alle ihre worte sind bewohnt. und alle ihre worte sind bewohnt. und alle ihre worte sind bewohnt. und alle ihre worte sind bewohnt. und alle ihre worte sind bewohnt. und alle ihre worte sind bewohnt. und alle ihre worte sind bewohnt. und alle ihre worte sind bewohnt. und alle ihre worte sind bewohnt. und alle ihre worte sind bewohnt. und alle ihre worte sind bewohnt. und alle ihre worte sind bewohnt. und alle ihre worte sind bewohnt. und alle ihre worte sind bewohnt. und alle ihre worte sind bewohnt. und alle ihre worte sind bewohnt. und alle ihre worte sind bewohnt. die dinge, die ich weither mit mir nahm,
sehn selten aus, gehalten an das ihre - : in ihrer großen heimat sind sie tiere, hier halten sie
den atem an vor scham. und alle ihre worte sind bewohnt. und alle ihre worte sind bewohnt. und alle ihre worte sind bewohnt. und alle ihre worte sind bewohnt. und alle ihre worte sind bewohnt. und alle ihre worte sind bewohnt. und alle ihre worte sind bewohnt. und alle ihre worte sind bewohnt. und alle ihre worte sind bewohnt. und alle ihre worte sind bewohnt. und alle ihre worte sind bewohnt. und alle ihre worte sind bewohnt. und alle ihre worte sind bewohnt. und alle ihre worte sind bewohnt. und alle ihre worte sind bewohnt. und alle ihre worte sind bewohnt. und alle ihre worte sind bewohnt. und alle ihre worte sind bewohnt.*

... and german is such awfully loud language to have all its words inhabited

*from Rainer Maria Rilke's The lonely one

The Scottish islands with a bit of (poetic) distance

... ok, my timing is often somewhat out of sync. But why not?

I felt really lucky to stumble across the Strawberries just before I left Glasgow. M had sent it to me first last summer along with some more of Edwin Morgan's poems about Glasgow. They are Glasgow just as much - though rather differently - as Eardley's paintings are Glasgow. Funnily enough - though not dissimilar in time, Morgan's Strawberries were maybe written ten years after many of Eardley's paintings - his poems are of a presence while she tries to recapture spirits and experiences of a sense of community that was disappearing.

But... out of the city and up North for today.

Quite a few weeks ago I had been watching some of the programmes of the BBC's poetry season. And made several discoveries. Firstly, obviously, much poetry of which I was utterly clueless. But, almost more significantly: the performance of doing poetry. One was by a young woman about growing up in a London housing scheme. And it was just utterly fabulous in presence. There was also another spoken word artist who was working with primary school children and rhymes, words and sounds as means of expression.... I think if I had someone like that for my German classes of years past, I would have loved them.

The programme I saw and which fascinated me was the one on George Mackay Brown who lived for most of his life in his home town of Stromness on Orkney, and died in the late 1990s. His most famous poem is Hamnavoe - the Norse name for Stromness.

Listen to it on this page of the Poetry Archive.

Hamnavoe by George Mackay Brown

My father passed with his penny letters
Through closes opening and shutting like legends
When barbarous with gulls
Hamnavoe's morning broke

On the salt and tar steps. Herring boats,
Puffing red sails, the tillers
Of cold horizons, leaned
Down the gull-gaunt tide

And threw dark nets on sudden silver harvests.
A stallion at the sweet fountain
Dredged Water, and touched
Fire from steel-kissed cobbles.

Hard on noon four bearded merchants
Past the pipe-spitting pier-head strolled,
Holy with greed, chanting
Their slow grave jargon.

A tinker keened like a tartan gull
At cuithe-hung doors. A crofter lass
Trudged through the lavish dung
In a dream of cornstalks and milk.

In "The Arctic Whaler" three blue elbows fell,
Regular as waves, from beards spumy with porter,
Till the amber day ebbed out
To its black dregs.

The boats drove furrows homeward, like ploughmen
In blizzards of gulls. Gaelic fisher girls
Flashed knife and dirge
Over drifts of herring,

And boys with penny wands lured gleams
From the tangled veins of the flood. Houses went blind
Up one steep close, for a
Grief by the shrouded nets.

The kirk, in a gale of psalms, went heaving through
A tumult of roofs, freighted for heaven. And lovers
Unblessed by steeples, lay under
The buttered bannock of the moon.

He quenched his lantern, leaving the last door.
Because of his gay poverty that kept
My seapink innocence
From the worm and black wind;

And because, under equality's sun,
All things wear now to a common soiling,
In the fire of images
Gladly I put my hand
To save that day for him.

There was an interview with Don Paterson, a contemporary Scottish poet, on the relevance of Mackay Brown. For Paterson, he was so relevant to the current generation of Scottish poets precisely because Mackay Brown offered a way of talking, writing and experiencing nature in a way that was relevant but did not try to appropriate or to own it.

That comment stuck - it resonated with my thought on landscape art as a genre and landscape as a subject of critique. And it also offered a tension to Gabriela Mistral's appropriation of the Chilean landscape for patriotism.

There's no painting to go with this, I'm afraid. But here one of Don Paterson's poems - on the most innermost of the Inner Hebrides, Luing. It's a complex and yet very simple line of thought, I like it.

Again: listen to it here.

Luing by Don Paterson

When the day comes, as the day surely must,
when it is asked of you, and you refuse
to take that lover’s wound again, that cup
of emptiness that is our one completion,

I’d say go here, maybe, to our unsung
innermost isle: Kilda’s antithesis,
yet still with its own tiny stubborn anthem,
its yellow milkwort and its stunted kye.

Leaving the motherland by a two-car raft,
the littlest of the fleet, you cross the minch
to find yourself, if anything, now deeper
in her arms than ever – sharing her breath,

watching the red vans sliding silently
between her hills. In such intimate exile,
who’d believe the burn behind the house
the straitened ocean written on the map?

Here, beside the fordable Atlantic,
reborn into a secret candidacy,
the fontanelles reopen one by one
in the palms, then the breastbone and the brow,

aching at the shearwater’s wail, the rowan
that falls beyond all seasons. One morning
you hover on the threshold, knowing for certain
the first touch of the light will finish you.

What images... gull-gaunt tide, seapink innocence and dreams of cornstalks and milk...

Now... poetry slams... Berlin has some... already seen some posters for it...

But also: landscape painting, round x, fields in oil... all here and in my bag, waiting to be unpacked...

Some strawberries for the leaving

...only the best ones... Edwin Morgan's. Fresh from an otherwise dingey subway station, they greeted me yesterday.

Summer lightning over the Kilpatrick Hills - am likely to miss those for this year, though I may be in luck tonight...


Some more of Edwin Morgan's wonderful poetry? About Glasgow? About love? About anything weird inbetween?

Try these:

• The Edwin Morgan Archive
• The Poetry Archive's page for Edwin Morgan

Oh - and in my bag now is a tiny book by another Scottish poet - The Collected Poems of George Mackay Brown... I'm quite pleased with my prioritising - it 1/10 of my luggage allowance but part of a plan for Scottish landscape escapism...

Busy with

STUFF...

while you may keep talking amongst yourself, here's Carol Ann Duffy's first gem while at Her Majesty's Service:

How it makes of your face a stone
that aches to weep, of your heart a fist,
clenched or thumping, sweating blood,
of your tongue
an iron latch with no door. How it makes
of your right hand
a gauntlet, a glove-puppet of the left, of
your laugh
a dry leaf blowing in the wind, of your
desert island discs
hiss, hiss, hiss, makes of the words on
your lips dice
that can throw no six. How it takes
the breath
away, the piss, makes of your kiss a
dropped pound coin,
makes of your promises latin, gibberish,
feedback static,
of your hair a wig, of your gait a plank-
walk. How it says this-
politics-to your education education
education; shouts this-
Politics!-to your health and wealth; how
it roars, to your
conscience moral compass truth,
POLITICS POLITICS POLITICS.

Carol Ann Duffy, Politics

More to read? Try this Guardian article.

Answering back... x2

Elqui 1, Detail, oil on canvas, 70x80cm

From the Guardian Magazine's Space Solves, 6 June 2009:

"Re Dear Diary... I need a Fireproof Safe (9 May), I, too have diaries that I try to keep safe. However, I have now produced a 10-word summary of each weekend on an Excel spreadsheet and have backed this up in several places. This is not only safe, but it can easily be searched, so helps to answer all those 'When did we last see Fred?'-type questions."

Hello?! ... I have some questions too... how about:

Am I asking the wrong questions?
Do I not understand the purpose of a diary?
Why do I never see Fred?

But that wasn't it. There's been more talking and answering back that led to some laughter. This time, M. and mine when I showed her one of my recent poetry finds, Carol Ann Duffy's edited collection of poets' responses to other poems, Answering Back.

Ready?

To women, as far as I am concerned

The feelings I don't have, I don't have.
The feelings I don't have, I won't say I have.
The feelings you say you have, you don't have.
The feelings you would like us both to have, we neither of us have,

The feelings people ought to have, they never have.
If people say they've got feelings, you may be pretty sure they haven't got them.

So, if you want either of us to feel anything at all
you'd better abandon all idea of feelings altogether.
DH Lawrence

Chosen by Jean Sprackland who responds with

Feelings

He adjusted the chain on my bike, so I let him
leave a few oily marks on my blouse. After that

he'd always be coming round when my parents were out,
asking how did I feel. Had my feelings
grown, altered or faded. Were they dying.

I thought of a tortoise asleep in a box of straw.
In spring you had to reach in and feel for warmth,
carry it onto the grass and try it with dandelions.

It was weeks before I knew that all I wanted
was to be driven at night up to the gravel pit
wearing only his proper coat, then to throw it off
and run into the water feeling nothing at all.

Going back to Elquí Valle

... I wish I was... but this has to suffice.

Pisco Elquí 1,
Pastel on Board, 35x25cm

My fellow Watermarkers have been putting up a fantastic set of posts around Water on Earth Day on our blog as well as their own blogs. So, I thought I'd join (and have excuse to bunk off early from my tedious lecture and presentation writing tasks that will bug me for the next week).

I mentioned how much I loved the day in Elquí Valle and the night spent stargazing at Mamalluca. Some of the reasons for that I hadn´t mentioned yet though. Let me make up for that.

Apart from the great clarity of the air and sky and the high contrast between hilltops and lime green valley floor it was the fact that Carlos, our guide for the day, didn`t really speak any English (well, I think he would maintain that he does, but he really didn´t) - so the day was spent in Spanish.

Secondly, the fact that one of our first stops was the tomb of Gabriela Mistral, ¿recuerdala? The great Chilean poet of earthy mysticism, romanticism and essentialism. She was born far up in the valley, in Montegrande at the end of c19 and was buried there.

So, as it is befitting for a poet, Carlos's first Spanish lesson for R and myself was ´Las tres grandes penas de Gabriela Mistral´- the three great sufferings of Gabriela Mistral: her father abandoned her family when she was three; a man who was madly in love with her committed suicide when she was 20; and her adoptive son (her brother's child, abondoned by his father at the age of six) also committed suicide when he was 18.

I hate the thought that all that much tragedy is necessary to be a good artist. But maybe it's not necessary, right?

In any case, almost two weeks later I bought a tattered copy of Mistral's Poema de Chile at a market stall in Santiago. I think many of the poems were written in the 1930s, she presented some of them at a conference on the human geography of Chile in the US in 1938. It's a patriotic and romantic attempt at nation building in poetry. It reads like an old-fashioned regional geography: covering not only different regions of the vast country but also the light, the stars, the mines, alcohol, trees, and the ocean. R and I are planning a good bit of text analysis of this - she for her lectures in environmental management, I for the problems I have with romantic landscapism. But more on that later.

I leave you with another verse found on the main square in Pisco Elquí - the village was called La Unión until 1936 when the Chilean government, in attempt to authenticate Pisco as of Chilean origin and not Peruvian - changed its name in a grand piece of economic policy. Imagine, Oban was to be changed to Whiskey Oban. How bizarre... but: here's Mistral on the sensuous qualities of Elquí Valle (suitably written on a pisco barrel).

'Since my touch has left behind these sweet and splendid pastures,
all that I am left with is the dry scent of those vines and fig trees ...'

29C and sunshine

... that's the forecast for Santiago de Chile, for tomorrow, the day after and the day after that.

How do I know? I've been checking it out frequently.

Why do I care? Because I will be there as of next Friday onwards. In fact - the forecast for Antofagasta in the North of Chile has been greeting me for past few days with incessant sunshine.

Now - Antofagasta - ANTOFAGASTA - hm, what a name... so many 'a's and so little else. Rather beautiful, don't you think? And, while the town maybe a bit much harbour and industry, it's on the way to this:

Moon rise over the Valle de la Luna, Chile,
by Simon Prisner

And the best of it all: I will be there at the next full moon. In San Pedro de Atacama.

The Atacama desert and the Pacific ocean, the Pacific ocean and the Atacama desert. A full moon and one of the clearest skies on earth. For three weeks.

Did I say where I will be going?

I've made some plans on painting/sketching material - and one of the things I'm seriously considering is taking a small plate along and some ink for monotypes.

Have you ever taken printmaking material on plein air outings? If so, what type of printmaking and where? I'm very intrigued by this - in fact, I may give it a try on my next trip to Balloch on Sunday with H. - that should give me a sense of practicality before lugging it halfway around the world.

Now - there was a plan to brush up my Spanish - that has for one reason or another not materialised. But, I had been doing a bit of digging around Chilenean poetry - there is Pablo Neruda of course. I also came across Gabriela Mistral. A mystical and rather romantic earthieness and invocation of nature... How's this for a start?

DESPERTAR

Dormimos, soñé la Tierra
del Sur, soñé el Valle entero,
el pastal, la viña crespa,
y la gloria de los huertos.
¿Qué soñaste tú mi Niño
con cara tan placentera?

Vamos a buscar chañares
hasta que los encontremos,
y los guillaves prendidos
a unos quioscos del infierno.
El que más coge convida
a otros dos que no cogieron.
Yo no me espino las manos
de niebla que me nacieron.
Hambre no tengo, ni sed y
sin virtud doy o cedo.
¿A qué agradecerme así
fruto que tomo y entrego?


And another one:

YO NO TENGO SOLEDAD

Es la noche desamparo
de las sierras hasta el mar.
Pero yo, la que te mece,
¡yo no tengo soledad!

Es el cielo desamparo
si la Luna cae al mar.
Pero yo, la que te estrecha,
¡yo no tengo soledad!

Es el mundo desamparo
y la carne triste va.
Pero yo, la que te oprime,
¡yo no tengo soledad!

And in case you wonder: no, my Spanish isn't good enough to get it completely, just a little bit and enough to be interested..., I'm sure there are some translations out there...

See here for more of her work in Spanish