Charles Olson

Adrift

irlandesuk poetry

Adrift

What a day
         the sun breaks through
and suddenly it’s spring
         and everyone has a lively step
I pop into the bookshop
         and browse the complete poems
of Charles Olson a complete poet
         a bear of a man whose father
delivered the mail all his life
         and did so proudly
I flick through the poems
         pausing here and there
when something catches my eye
         I read of a dog a cat and the moon
and then I read that America
         has no history and I think
Who needs history
         what is this history fetish
why not be content to live
         in the day
with all the slings and arrows
         of outrageous good fortune ?

That a man’s creative life
         can be reduced to so few pages
that disturbs me
         and the fact that all leaves
are leaves of grass
         and that all song
even that of the kingfisher
         will one day fall silent

What kind of a profession
         is poetry—poets should get a job
poets should not whine
         about the state of the union
not think that they are
         a law unto themselves
The body is a shell
         a housing that can grow old
and decrepit even as the mind
         flourishes beneath the rain

Sing of her who has a beautiful face
         whose eyes are unsung beacons
sing of them and of her breasts
         her high cheekbones her hands
that twist and turn to the rhythm
         of her thoughts her kindly thoughts

Olson’s poems were pathways
         were routes mapped out with words
Out of Gloucester out of the geographies
         of his youth he drew up charts
by which to navigate the turbulent waters
         his imagination gripped by a white whale
What does not change / he wrote
         is the will to change

John Lyons

Dead Fingers Talk

irlandesuk poetry , , , ,

HuneferDead fingers talk. Our language comes from community, from those present and from those who have gone before us. Keep it simple! Charles Olson wrote that the breath is the unit of composition in poetry. Our texts are echoes of other texts, others have breathed before us. Truth is the raw material of poetry and has been recognised as such since the earliest days of the alphabet, the alpha and omega of writing.

In the accompaning illustration from the Egyptian Book of the Dead, the scene, from the Papyrus of Hunefer (c. 1275 BC), shows the scribe Hunefer’s heart being weighed on the scale of Maat against the feather of truth, by the jackal-headed Anubis. The ibis-headed Thoth, scribe of the gods, records the result. If his heart equals exactly the weight of the feather, Hunefer is allowed to pass into the afterlife. If not, he is eaten by the waiting chimeric devouring creature Ammit composed of the deadly crocodile, lion, and hippopotamus.