Judy
what a remarkable reply!
I can say I'm not in retreat: this latest piece was written before my
previous. As for Oedipus-schmeedipus: I grew up in a quadrangle,
composed of myself, my parents and the ghost of my brother, who died
before my birth. I can confess that when I was thirteen I thought
'Sons and Lovers' a great book, but it was more for the description of
the fight with Baxter Dawes.
When I did read Freud, I found it disappointingly 'shallow' (your good
word). I do think that often in family structures the parents are the
primary persons of either sex that one forms a relationship with and
that has an influence on later relationships but I wouldn't go much
further than that common-sensical observation.
I posted the piece, btw, because at the weekend I actually found a
copy of my long-lost childhood encyclopedia, in a charity shop. I've
had some rather Proustian moments since!
Still chewing on the rest of your post, thanks, most interesting.
All the Best
Dave
2008/8/14 Judy Prince <[log in to unmask]>:
> You're still fighting the poem-book, Dave. A genius who wants to retreat.
> Don't retreat.
> Poetry's beauty is that it's not prose. Your book began, as today's
> "chapter" begins, as poetry, and then you decided to explain, and then you
> got back to the glory.
>
> Poetry's beauty is that it doesn't explain; that's not its purpose. It
> Reveals, in a taut shiver or a sagging that we readers have worn, too. And
> we want help.
>
> What do _you_ want? What do you most fervently want?
>
> In your Oedipal triangle, at times so lush and hurting, what does the little
> boy do? He's a full third of the poembook, nah?
>
> Is it, in fact, so shallow as an Oedipal triangle?
>
> Is there any humour---not mocking, but a fireside humour---in the
> boy-recalls?
>
> Ah, these were bold and gentle times and folk, despite what you'll surfacely
> think. And you've given us some of that.
>
> We want nothing less than all of your recollections....poetic.
>
> Git on w' you, then.
>
> Judy
>
>
>
> 2008/8/14 David Bircumshaw <[log in to unmask]>
>
>> From My Home Encyclopaedia:
>>
>>
>> I have a vague memory of my father, pot-bellied and seemingly a torso
>> with an assumption of legs, but led to bed, assisted by my mother as
>> politeness would say, approximately drunk, as a swaying object
>> somewhere about the fourth year of my reign.
>> In our small flat. Which appeared to possess a hall of sorts, like
>> the illusion of perspective, bridging the between of the two bedrooms
>> (the smaller, mine; the larger, theirs) and the living-room (ours)
>> which was where, in stage terms, the language claimed we acted out our
>> lives.
>> He does not then seem to appear for years, though for sure he too
>> lived with us. He had to do something called work, by day, which was
>> distant (sometimes two bus rides away) and alien, as unlike as Welsh,
>> and at nights was required by the pub, where George met the Dragon,
>> the union, and his mates. Which my mother condemned, for the drink.
>> But the plain and ever-present fact of his absence she did not
>> protest. Otherwise, he must have inhabited that same mist that covers
>> so much of my early (and more recent) memories.
>> I think he recurred when I measured eight, as I recall an evening
>> before the still-then coal-fire, a glowing snugly winter's evening,
>> when my mother urged and urged me to mock his nose (its largeness) his
>> tea (its undrinkability) his friends (their smell) his importance (its
>> littleness). That fades, and I am sitting on the floor and he is high
>> and seated above me but mumbling in a voice he tells me means that he
>> was born elsewhere, not, God forbid, here, mumbling all his funny
>> (unfunny) stories of his childhood, of crowding with brothers and
>> sisters round a pot yum-yumming at the prospect of stewed peel of
>> potatoes and apple-rind, of his trousers damp from the wash that
>> stank, of horse-shitten cobbled streets, of fresh milk in churns, of
>> playing with hot coals in braziers, swinging them faster and faster
>> around in an arc from his bare knees to his head and he laughs again,
>> his out of place, living in his own world, alone and loveless at the
>> hearth at the heart of his family, laugh.
>> And I can retrieve too a Saturday and a day-trip on the Midland Red
>> through Tewkesbury (where we stopped for toast) and Upton-on-Severn
>> (where from the upper-deck I watched how the river looped about the
>> houses like a noose about to close) and Evesham, with all its
>> close-packed churches, of which I remember nothing.
>> And, too, I can re-stock a road by a beach-front at Rhyl (it might
>> have been) or Weston or somewhere else to the west and on the coast
>> again, walking between and joined to their hands and sensing people,
>> adult people, (my parents) for this time at least together, smiling.
>> And a restaurant where we ate plaice. Or sole.
>> And once seeing him cry, from the numb cold of his bricklaying
>> hands, that fed us all, in the bitter world that was his alone and
>> winter.
>>
>>
>>
>> --
>> David Bircumshaw
>> Website and A Chide's Alphabet
>> http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/
>> The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
>> Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk
>>
>
--
David Bircumshaw
Website and A Chide's Alphabet http://homepage.ntlworld.com/david.bircumshaw/
The Animal Subsides http://www.arrowheadpress.co.uk/books/animal.html
Leicester Poetry Society: http://www.poetryleicester.co.uk
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