> Calligraphy & painting as ways of seeing: I like how it works here,
> Lawrence.
>
>
> In a sense just underlining what the series is attempting, but
> foregrounding that aspect...
>
I suppose so, Doug
in a way I am finding out what it is I am doing by posting here
I was wondering recently if I'll be able to write more about the bar etc
now I am aware!!
Mind you, I remember a good friend (I couldn't have said it otherwise) had
her third child and I wrote _I think you should stop now_
Time to move on maybe
*
kind of changing the subject, I was given back a loan copy of my book
_unframed pictures_ today and told that a friend of the returner had read
the book too and recognised some of the places - he knows Scilly I am told
Now... I am going to check but I don't think the archipelago is named
anywhere in the book -- it's a verbal tour as it were of someone else's
pictures; that much is made clear in the cover blurb. There is one picture
imagining islands from the air
So I have a feeling that the one told the other it is about Scilly because
he knows of my connection and the other saw it
Most -- all? -- of the pictures in the book do not exist, never did, I
imagined them
So I am thinking this is part of the drive to know what a poem is about
rather than treating it as poetry. My friend, my acquaintance, no, my
friend, tends to be literal, and likes to know what he is looking at, what
one is doing. It seems to panic him if you say that you have no idea. I
tried _negative capability_ on him once, but after initial interest he
began backing out, wanting to know what Keats meant. He didn't like it
when I suggested that Keats' meaning is, within evidential limits, up for
grabs!
I go back to an anti-war reading I was asked to join some years back --
introduced by "Lawrence is a sound poet and he's going to perform his
protest at the war" (!)
I thanked him and said I was confused and had said no such thing. I then
read a poem with words in lines etc etc against hegemonistic power; not a
very good poem actually but I didn't know that then
Afterwards he seemed quite cross and said "But youre a sound poet"
Now it seems I am Scilly poet
ah well -- when I got back from Bristol the other night, it was nearly one
in the morning -- it's the going from and to the North Downs to Paddington
Station that does it, because that's longer than the actual journey west,
even if you ignore the train company's barmy advice about the quickest way
-- and they were broadcasting the late night shipping forecast... I was so
tired I just sat on the floor to listen to it with my head against the bed
clothes
If you have never heard the UK Shipping Forecast, you may not understand
that, and I feel sorry for your deprivation
at that moment, two things happened almost simultaneously
1 a spider on her thread on the way from the ceiling to the floor passed
close by my face and I, not being fond of the beasts, jumped and brushed
it away
2 the voice on the radio said _Scilly automatic_ by which he or she meant
a machine for reporting the weather in the area around Scilly
Bloody hell, I thought, it is a coherent universe; and went to bed
L
On Thu, December 1, 2011 16:03, Douglas Barbour wrote:
> Calligraphy & painting as ways of seeing: I like how it works here,
> Lawrence.
>
>
> In a sense just underlining what the series is attempting, but
> foregrounding that aspect...
>
> Doug
> On 2011-12-01, at 5:22 AM, Lawrence Upton wrote:
>
>
>> A wide backslash brushstroke of sea-rubble,
>> mostly but not all grey, from the halfway, east to west, to a midpoint
>> and a bit over the top of the sand, going south to north. It zigzags,
>> from the upstroke’s end in three nearly horizontal stripes like a jerky
>> blind unfolding towards Agnes, dangling just more than the hurl of a
>> large stone from the ramp down to the water-smoothed towan on which a dog
>> cuts deep calligraphies with assiduous enthusiasm, pausing suddenly, one
>> paw held about to flick sand backwards over the granite-specked surface
>> otherwise uninscribed. Soon the waves’ ideogram will go under retelling
>> sea once more. The dog will be away long since, eating
>> or sleeping or digging something elsewhere, scratching the story of its
>> inner life, not knowing it is possible to read back what we have written;
>> and unaware that marks represent the noise of mouths if we believe it’s
>> so and work at it. Once more the churn and its loose material
>> shall work at dry expressions of themselves.
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> -----
>> UNFRAMED GRAPHICS by Lawrence Upton
>> 42 pages; A5 paperback; colour cover
>> Writers Forum 978 1 84254 277 4
>> wfuk.org.uk/blog ----
>>
>>
>
> Douglas Barbour
> [log in to unmask] [log in to unmask]
>
> http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
> http://eclecticruckus.wordpress.com/
>
>
> Latest books:
> Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
> http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
> Wednesdays'
> http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-press_10
> .html
>
>
> and as you read the sea is turning its dark pages turning its dark pages.
>
> Denise Levertov
>
>
>
>
>
>
>
-----
UNFRAMED GRAPHICS by Lawrence Upton
42 pages; A5 paperback; colour cover
Writers Forum 978 1 84254 277 4
wfuk.org.uk/blog
----
|