These are good comments, Bob. I accept that its a bit lecture-like, but I
think I am clear - when I am using we I mean English language readers,
people reading the book from 'our' viewpoint, and when I use I am referring
to my personal connections, e.g. I am not an "official" poet or novelist but
a reader and as a reader I connect.
You dont have to connect to Keats at all. I was stuck for a title and if one
can't respond 'after reading' any book, whats the point of reading and
writing at all?
Gary commented the poem sounded Russian, and I have to admit I am a bit
disillusioned with the flippant giggly way some English poetry is going at
the moment, as if there were nothing to write about but unimportant
nonsense, and in a way this poem is a protest about that.
Thanks for your interest,
SallyE
on 5/11/02 3:22 pm, Bob Cooper at [log in to unmask] wrote:
> Hi Sallyee,
> Sorry I'm so far behind with my reading and writing these little messages...
> and I hope it's worth saying that I tend to agree with Christina's comments
> about the way you're using your lines and rhymes and words. At times it
> sounds like a (clumsy-ish) translation into English! I guess a trip to the
> hairdressers would do the poem a bit of good!
> On a more quizzical note I wonder who the "we" is in the poem? The
> pluralised we/our language is public oration yet I guess, I wonder, how that
> fits with Pasternak's situation/temprement and how it fits in a society that
> may be hardly familiar with his poetry (and only know about Dr Zhivago
> because females took their males to the cinema so they could admire Omar
> Shareef!). Then, in the middle, it's "I" - and I guess the inclusive "our"
> that you use excludes Pasternak!
> I also wonder how much I have to connect to Keat's "After Reading Chapman's
> Homer"? I find a tad of an echo in the title myself. But the title may just
> be alluding to a tradition of poets writing about other poets - which is all
> I found myself.
> Bob
>
>
>
>
>
>
>> From: Sally Evans <[log in to unmask]>
>> Reply-To: The Pennine Poetry Works <[log in to unmask]>
>> To: [log in to unmask]
>> Subject: New sub: After reading Pasternak
>> Date: Tue, 29 Oct 2002 22:13:31 +0000
>>
>> here is a big heavy new sub, folks, on the lines of my "Eng Lit" poems. I'd
>> like to know if your views on its problems are the same as mine. The lines
>> are very long so I hope they dont split too confusingly. They are long
>> lined quatrains that end-rhyme aa,bb.
>>
>> After reading Pasternak.
>>
>> Totality a rink of fear, snowed in by purity,
>> Yuri wrote with love's ink, through years of insecurity,
>> his world filled with glowing visions, clamorously lilting views,
>> wolvine familiar vistas, flowing elisions, glamorous hopes, ability to
>> choose.
>>
>> Chosen, a country of the brave and willing who had forgotten the ropes of
>> their fate
>> when politics caved in, gave way to killing. Utterly hard to love or hate
>> or to crystallise goodness, or hunt creation out of the charred, wrecked
>> chance
>> life gave: to distil from the burnt blaze of a situation the perfect
>> response.
>>
>> A country Nabokov and Brodsky differed from, it was your dove
>> flying to stars of grace. MacDiarmid's mentor Lermontov
>> and Pushkin who so splendidly provoked more fearsome than Byronic
>> forces to stem him, in his tracks revoked. Tolstoy, that old beatnik,
>>
>> spilled tales across those wide wild wastes, between long rivers sneaking
>> uncharted and unbridged: we heard the pace and roar of your speaking.
>> You penned down laborious pages, in languages we take small part in
>> nor bother slaving with, while, we gather, you appreciated Greek and Latin.
>>
>> It was too much to ask of us to listen beyond light-programmes
>> we could not help attend, while courts glistened, luring you to pogroms
>> from servitude to servitude of such dimension we in Europe hardly dared
>> to entertain, until our hordes were bogged in trenchment mud, not spared.
>>
>> How distant seemed your literary and political crossroads.
>> Women heaved sickles, tackled boars and bricks and heavy loads
>> while ours faltered and fainted, ribbon-goaded brothers awkard and inept.
>> A new age carelesly painted unimagnable concepts.
>>
>> Boris, how was your fate unravelled? It is late and I am no Russky or
>> communist or even travelled. It is another century, another war
>> and I so non-specific, neither a pucker poet nor a novelist
>> nor worker, nor retired, prolific, aristo nor poor; an anti-genderist,
>>
>> for generalities are all I ask in general. Still, I shout in fright,
>> I can respond to bookish tasks, these feats that must diminish under
>> distant
>> light
>> where serfs, dearth, duels, haunt gigantic steppes beyond
>> our flaunted ignorance. What would we expect of antique words like >fond<,
>>
>> <warmth<, >fire< or >hope<? A poem that carries fire and hope I hope yet
>> frees
>> my heart, a heart still marching with earlier hearts like those your
>> fantasies
>> connect with. In our language Hardy's characters may be like them.
>> As though we now consumed among our worldly stratagem
>>
>> antidotes to the searing senses, snows and forest leaves
>> a scrap of foraged seed the wocked cuckoo dispenses, rotten harvest
>> sheaves.
>> Sure, laughing swallow, you may flee the river-beds and bilberry
>> in tundra, your secret to follow, flight-led, unencumbered, fortune's
>> poetry.
>>
>> c Sally Evans
>
>
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