Well, I wasn't proposing "L=A=N=G-Pig" too seriously--but have in the
meantime read a chunk of _Malcolm Mooney's Land_, including the
"grammarsow...word-louse" bit. (Why no "sic" for Graham's twist on
"woodlouse," too?)
MML strikes me as more of a narrative poem than a philosophical one (on the
basis of partial reading only, though), but rereading those earlier and
later poems you've got posted at your website, Matthew, made see why Robin
senses a lyric-to-philosophic development in Graham. Something seems to have
blown through and shaken up the work round about 1955, going by the website
selection and grossly generalizing from it admittedly. The poems from the
1940s seem quite conventional to me, but with "Letter VI" there's a sense of
rattled syntax and ruptured imagistic-sensory foundations, of the first
line's "wind" to the penultimate line's "roar" throwing everything up in the
air (and into question) aesthetically like a tornado in an art museum. Nd
the poems that come later are so much more preoccupied with "space" and the
"abstract" (recurring terms in MML too) than the early, more temporally
focused poems. That shift from time lyric to a more expansive and spatially
conscious poem seems also to have coincided with a shift from the visual to
the aural, with "ear" recurring as often as "space" and "abstract" in the
poems of the 1970s (again, going by this small but perhaps representative
sample).
Does this mark a shift from the lyrical to the philosophical, though? I
don't know and wouldn't want to say on the basis of so few poems, but I'd be
interested in how it seems to you, Robin, or others here who know Graham's
work better (and know more of it) than I do.
Candice
on 8/5/01 7:18 AM, Matthew Francis at [log in to unmask]
wrote:
> Candice writes (replying to Robin):
>
>
>>> language dimension. Grammersow and all.
>>
>> Hmm. L=A=N=G-Pig?
>>
>
> 'Grammersow' is a Cornish dialect word meaning woodlouse. W.S. Graham (who
> lived in Cornwall) loved to pun on it, as in 'Malcolm Mooney's Land', where
> the explorer /poet Mooney in his Arctic tent appeals to the insects
> infesting his sleeping-bag:
>
> Come, bonny friendly beasts, brother
> To the grammarsow [sic] and the word-louse,
> Bite me your presence, keep me awake
> In the cold with work to do...
>
> Best wishes
>
> Matthew
|