Thanks to my friend Brian Creswick (whose website will be up this week), I’ve discovered the hilarious and surreal poetry and song of Ivor Cutler:
Fame first came in the late Fifties. He was lying on his bed with a primitive tape recorder for company and, as he puts it, a story came out of his brain. Surprised at the ease at which he could bypass his intellect he tried again, and a second story emerged and was also recorded. Then a third. Writing poetry then began to manifest itself. “My way of writing poetry was to go to a jazz concert and just let the music come through me and just write nonsense poems, so that one was listening to the noise of the words rather than the meaning. I wouldn’t allow my intellect to get in the way. After six years I found certain sounds more to my taste than others and I gradually began to use actual words”.
Cutler is a strange man, and his poems and songs, which he has read and performed on the BBC’s Peel Sessions as well as at festivals and events around the world, are whimsical pieces of aural art, by turns very funny and somehow poignant and sad, as if they have all been written in a minor key. For years he accompanied himself on harmonium, sounding like a Scottish Alan Ginsberg. His poetry needs to be heard to be appreciated. But in case you don’t have a soundcard, here is a little one to read:
Happy Hen
The happiness of birds is not reflected in their faces. Strictly, birds do not have a face, just an arrangement of organs around the head. If a hen looks badtempered, it is due to a superficial disposal of its features, and if you place your ear by its beak, it may be heard humming a contemporary dance tune in a happy, thready fashion.
The happiness of birds is not reflected in their faces. Strictly, birds do not have a face, just an arrangement of organs around the head. If a hen looks badtempered, it is due to a superficial disposal of its features, and if you place your ear by its beak, it may be heard humming a contemporary dance tune in a happy, thready fashion.
The entire cosmos copulation. And each thing is word, word of love. Only love reveals but it veils what it reveals, alone it reveals, alone lover and beloved in the illuminated solitude, the nights of the lovers, word that never passes while the water flows beneath the bridge and the slow moon above the houses passes.
— Ernesto Cardenal Cosmic Canticle, Cantiga 2: “The Word”
"What's you understanding, general, of that first force?" The journalist Belausteguigoitia asked. Sandino replied: "As a conscious force. Initially it was love. That love creates, evolves. But everything is eternal. And we are moving towards life being not a passing moment but an eternity, through the multiple facets of the ephemeral."
— Ernesto Cardenal Cosmic Canticle, Cantiga 12: “Birth of Venus”
I am noticing lots of pieces of writing out there which are trying to find ways of understanding the primal creation in terms of it’s echo in the universe that we have come to inhabit. Of course, Cardenal’s masterwork continually points us in this direction. So too does Edgar Allen Poe’s “Eureka: A prose poem.” And also this, from Bruce Cockburn:
Lord of the Starfields
Lord of the starfields
Ancient of Days
Universe Maker
Here’s a song in your praise
Wings of the storm cloud
Beginning and end
You make my heart leap
Like a banner in the wind
O love that fires the sun
Keep me burning.
Lord of the starfields
Sower of life,
Heaven and earth are
Full of your light
Voice of the nova
Smile of the dew
All of our yearning
Only comes home to you
O love that fires the sun
keep me burning
I’m on a bit of a kick with this stuff at the moment. Know of any other pieces that fit the mold?
The Ecotone wiki, a collaborative project by bloggers who write about place, gets it’s official launch this week with a collection of essays about how we all came to write about place.
My contribution, from my Bowen Island Journal, is about how I began to see the world through the eyes of an exile while I was living in England as a kid. Others at the Ecotone wiki seem to also be drawing on both their childhood experiences and experiences of moving, and being dislocated as some point in their lives. I think it is this dislocation that gives us the lens through which we come to see the place in which we live.
Fred First in Floyd County, Virginia, USA puts some legs on this idea, and its implications, in his post:
When we write about place we explore particular coordinates of geography and landform and private experience, guided by our own life maps, seen through lenses that can bind me to your world across the globe’s wide curve. And doing so connects us person to person, territory to territory, pulling real places from the representational map that is the internet. Can this writing about place bring us into each other’s world, build community? I trust we will see.
I write about place to invite strangers to know and understand my world, perhaps to see their world differently having come here, with new and useful landmarks on their maps when they leave. So perhaps I write, too, as a an open page of hospitality, a way of saying “my house is your house, and my creek and valley, likewise”. Maybe I think and write about place because, as I believe Wendell Berry has suggested, if you don’t know where you’re from, you won’t know where you’re going. In some small or great way, it may be possible in writing on this topic to help each other know where we’re going by better understanding the places from which we have come.
We will be writing once every two weeks on a different topic. Feel free to join us.
The odds of any one person in the blogoshpere sharing your brithday is…well…pretty good. Happy birthday Jordan.
Happy Birthday to me!
I was born 35 years ago today. This what else was happening that late spring day in 1968:
- Picasso paints the above picture
- Young soldier in Vietnam wrote home about losing his camera
- Nine people were killed by a tornado in Tracy, Minnesota
- A Day of Awareness, Day of Hope is held in Atlanta to combat poverty
- A helicopter crew dies in Vietnam when they collide with another plane
- Phelim O’Neil is expelled from the Orange Order in Belfast for attending a Catholic service
- The BeeGees record Indian Gin and Whiskey Dry
- The Shah of Iran speaks at Harvard University on the challenges of the developing world. He quotes Saadi, Coleridge, Confucius and the Bible
- The tanker World Glory spills 14.2 million gallons of oil in the Indian Ociean, 105 kilometres east of Durban, South Africa.
- A single Red Knot was spotted in the St. Croix River Valley in Minnesota
- Gloucestershire beats Cambridge University by an innings and 69 runs. Green and Shepard have centuries.
- Five days after he is imprisoned, Hussain Ibrahim’s house is blown up by Israeli solders in Ramallah because he is accussed of being a member of Fateh. His wife and sons are left homeless.
- Pope Paul VI gives an Audience during which he warns of the dangers of a lack on faith in an incresingly materialistic world.
I would like to say that having children is one of the greatest acts of faith anyone can commit. So here’s a resounding thank you to my parents for helping me to experience the Precious Human Birth:
Since you have a precious human birth, you should not waste it. If you waste this time, then you are wasting something very great. Even were you to waste a billion dollars, it doesn’t matter. You can make it up. You can do something, and you can make it up. But if you waste this precious human birth, it is very, very difficult. You cannot make it up.
— Khenpo Tsewang Gyatso Rinpoche