The poetry thread

[AndersWestberg]

A little poem by a swedish author, directly translated by me :-)

Kärlekens matematik

jag älskar en kvinna
jag är kär i en andra och
tillsammans med en tredje
den första lämnade mig för friheten
den andra skildes från mig som en vän och
den tredje ska jag lämna för att försöka med den andra
den andra kommer jag att försaka om den första kan älska mig igen

The mathematics of love

I love one woman
I'm in love with a second and
together with a third
the first one left me for freedom
the secon left me as a friend and
the third one i will leave to try with the second
the second i will forsake if the first can love me again

[Philidor]

Hi Anders, good to see you.

[AndersWestberg]

Yeah, same to you! I have been extremely bussy IRL. Making music, moving around to different appartments (the living situation in Sweden is ridicoulous) and working.

Im sorry i have not fulfilled my obligations towards this site. I wish i had dun more with the tools you have given me...

[Philidor]

Originally Posted by AndersWestberg

Yeah, same to you! I have been extremely bussy IRL. Making music, moving around to different appartments (the living situation in Sweden is ridicoulous) and working.

Im sorry i have not fulfilled my obligations towards this site. I wish i had dun more with the tools you have given me...

Don't worry about it mate. Seriously. Just you is more than good enough. What's the housing problem in Sweden -- not enough of it?

[stephen w]

Originally Posted by micrologus

In my race with time
Still a few late wishes ask directions.

I whisper them the sanctuary of a sad song
and pursue them with sweet words crumbling
in machined consolation. No more coins
in the slow-motion of falling illusions.

If the waves are quiet, quiet is the lamp.
And if the night wafts in
I am allowed to stand soon forgotten past
in which future still awaits gentle restoration
of good old hope.


Bart Stouten

I like this, I've re-read it several times: mysterious and quiet. Do you have any more?

[stephen w]

9

[stephen w]

John Fairfax
With fellow poet John Moat, he established the Arvon Foundation

Adam Thorpe
The Guardian, Wednesday 21 January 2009
Article history


For some 50 years the poet John Fairfax, who has died aged 78, lived in a 15th-century gamekeeper's thatched cottage, the "Thatch", at peppercorn rent, thanks to a poetry-loving landowner. Embedded among beech near the Berkshire village of Hermitage (where an equally penniless DH Lawrence took refuge during the first world war), the only visible sign from the lane was a hoisted flag in the garden, periodically changed. Walls yellowed by tobacco, cricket on the dicky transistor, a clutter that seemed blown in from some magical otherness: this was deep England. Somewhere in the smoke was John's mischievous smile of eternal youth. In front of the fire, deep in conversation, you never wanted to leave.

The Thatch was, for John, both inspiration and haven; it has also been a subtle lodestone for the poetry world in Britain, as something of its atmosphere has been recreated through the Arvon Foundation, which John "invented" with fellow poet John Moat in 1968, at first at Beaford in Devon and very soon afterwards at Totleigh Barton, later at venues in Yorkshire, Wales and Scotland. Students retreat for a week to one of the Arvon houses with two practised writers.

But first it was poetry and "Arvon", a name that emerged from the works of Taliesin, ancient Welsh bard and poet. A sceptical Ted Hughes, invited to read on the first Arvon course, was taken aback by "the strange, intense euphoria... the voltage of new-found imagination". By sticking to the blueprint, the Arvon has recharged that voltage for thousands of people in the decades since, working on our perceptions of poetry and also covering novels, theatre, TV, and radio.

The origins of this notion can be found in John's own eccentric upbringing. He was born in Devon, and was the nephew on his half-Irish mother's side of George and Kit Barker, the former being the supreme bohemian of modern English letters ("a most peculiar fellow", in TS Eliot's words), fathering 15 children and an equally impressive body of verse. John's English father - a naval photographer - was frequently away, and George acted as a surrogate parent in his Sussex cottage ("uninhabitable, except by poets"). When he needed to write, he would tell "Young John" to work at his sums.

He survived wartime schooldays at Plymouth college - including the city's destruction in 1941 by the Luftwaffe - and claimed to have learned to fly, in Tiger Moths. Very soon he was on his way to London, where his mother was living, and Young John had a teenage spell in the "dark bars" of Soho in the company of Dylan Thomas, Francis Bacon and others. He skipped university in favour of his uncle's "collection of misfits" in Zennor, near St Ives in Cornwall - another Lawrence haunt. There he went out fishing to pay his cottage rent and wrote poems to pay for drinks at the Tinner's Arms. This was an integral part of the artistic community's dedication, as were Barker tutorials: Young John's efforts were submitted to his uncle's ruthless attention, with daily practice stressed as much as inspiration. Surprisingly, this did nothing to quench his passionate desire to be a poet. As he later wrote, after an incident in the 1960s when George - a man of lively humour - had attacked him in the Thatch with an axe: "You made me into an axe/...made me cut rings/round verbs until I could chip/out sounds... or sing a song/unheard in the green woods."

Joining the Quaker community as an ambulance driver in 1950 did not save him from more than two months' solitary confinement in Reading and Lewes jails as a conscientious objector. After he met Esther, his wife-to-be, at a Dylan Thomas party, they moved briefly to Paris, where she danced for their living in a nightclub. They married in 1952 and his subsequent jobs included private eye and (astonishingly, given the later efforts of the Berkshire police to keep him off the road) driving instructor. From 1955 to 1960 he taught at Brockhurst prep school in Berkshire, and it was there that he discovered the Thatch, mouldering in the woods. John then taught, until 1964, at John O' Gaunt school in Hungerford while John Moat filled the Brockhurst vacancy. In the early 1960s the two met in a pub, assuring as a result the health of British poetry.

A man of equability, handsomeness and charm, John avoided the poetry scene, quietly producing his own work - including Adrift on the Star-brow of Taliesin (1974) and Bone Harvest Done (1980), and co-authoring with Moat several guides to writing. His anthology of space poetry, Frontier of Going (1969), included Norman Nicholson and Edwin Morgan as "dreamers of the world, rhymers of moon and dune", while as editor of the Phoenix Press he gave a platform to younger poets, including his partner from the mid-1980s to the mid-90s, Sue Stewart. Latterly he collaborated on open air commissions with his artist sons Jo and Michael, and thus are his poems to be found from Chester-le-Street to Plymouth and, it is said, on a time capsule on the Moon.

His scrawled dedication in the first book of his I ever bought, more than 30 years ago, was: "Live like a poet!" Yet for all his bohemian boyishness, to watch him tutoring in the goose shed at Totleigh Barton was to witness an absolute pro at work, "worrying" at poem after poem, gently bringing students' long-buried confidence to the light. His own verse includes Elan, one of the most perfect lyrics in contemporary poetry:

Hide of cattle, feather of fowl,
Granite of hill and wild mountain,
Lonely, lonely, lovely Elan.

To see, to live, is to be breath
On ice, tear in a storm of rain: is man
Among autumn rising in your long voice

He is survived by two sons from his marriage (which ended in 1981), three grandchildren and his partner, Helena Michie.

• John Fairfax, poet, born 9 November 1930; died January 14 2009

[Philidor]

STRANGE MEETINGS

If suddenly a clod of earth should rise,
And walk about, and breathe, and speak, and love,
How one would tremble, and in what surprise
Gasp: "Can you move?"

I see men walking, and I always feel:
"Earth! How have you done this? What can you be?"
I can't learn how to know men, or conceal
How strange they are to me.

Harold Monro

[maureen]

nice contribution to this thread
it is so true

[stephen w]

All nature has a feeling: woods, fields, brooks
Are life eternal: and in silence they
Speak happiness beyond the reach of books;
There's nothing mortal in them; their decay
Is the green life of change; to pass away
And come again in blooms revivified.
Its birth was heaven, eternal it its stay,
And with the sun and moon shall still abide
Beneath their day and night and heaven wide.

John Clare