After the wedding: a fairy tale. Poems I have written #3

After the Wedding. A Fairy Tale. 

Rush lights and fire’s light

Shadow and shiver.

where the story teller sits.

on the edges of darkness.

 

During the wedding feast,

clatter and scrape 

battered by music 

the baron asking

his old friend the King.

 

This new son in law. 

Never heard of him.

Where’s the family from?

 

Somewhere…

Shouting to be heard

by the man beside him. 

…beyond the forest.

 

But you’ve given him your daughter!

 

I saw the way she looked at him,

I knew what happened next.

It’s better they were married.

 

But she’s had so many suitors.

Remember whatsisname.

Everything a father could want

In a son in law.

 

She wouldn’t even look at him.

This one was different.

He arrived, alone, 

asking for her hand.

He looked penniless 

so I sent him packing

But next day he returned 

with gifts, and the day after, 

and the day after,

each time with an escort

of the best appointed knights 

I’ve ever seen.

And she was smitten. Tonight 

they consummate the marriage:

tomorrow, he takes her to his kingdom.

 

You might never see her again.

That doesn’t bother you?

 

The old king shrugged; 

I’ve got a room full of gold. 

He didn’t ask me for her dowry.

 

2

 

After the music and dancing,

when the wedding guests 

were boisterous and drunk,

the lusty couple hurried to bed.

In the morning, rising early,

they met his escort at the gate

and rode towards the west.

 

The first night of their journey,

they found a clearing in the forest.

The escort made their bed,

beneath a gold embroidered canopy,

retiring to a respectable distance,

in a circle, facing outwards.

 

In the morning the girl awoke.

The silence was impressive.

There was no escort, just a circle 

of dead mushrooms,

and beside her on their bed, 

her beautiful young man was snoring.

 

He had aged a thousand years.

Opening his eyes on the glorious sight 

of his naked, smiling wife.

 

I am sorry that I tricked you.

But not for the days 

and nights we’ve shared

Now that you’ve seen me as I am…

He reached for the nearest weapon.

 

Stupid man, she said, 

stopping his hand. 

I’ve always known,

you had to be a fake.

 

An army made of mushrooms

gold from chrysanthemums 

can bribe my greedy father.

The only thing I trust

is the truth of our affection.

 

She kissed him and he was young again;

the mushrooms were their tactful escort

and they all lived happily ever after.

 

Rushlights and fire’s light

fading and dying

hiding the storyteller’s smile.

Based loosely on an event in the Welsh life of Saint Beuno, where the man is an artisan confused with a Prince. In Beuno's story the man kills the girl as they ride away after their wedding, and Bruno puts her head back on and brings her back to life. The transformative mushrooms are from the Fourth Branch of the Mabinogion. 

This is the third 'experiment' in story telling. It's a work in progress. 

The other two are here:

https://ladygodivaandme.blogspot.com/2024/01/kings-champion-ballad-of-sorts.html

and 

https://ladygodivaandme.blogspot.com/2024/01/taking-possession-story-of-norman.html 

C.S.Lewis on the necessity of rereading.

C.S.Lewis ‘There is hope for a man who never read Malory or Boswell or Tristram Shandy or Shakespeare’s Sonnets; but what can you do with a man who says he ‘has read’ them, meaning he has read them once and that settles the matter?”

Reading Lewis the critic and medieval scholar is always a pleasure. It's an educated conversation with a very well-read man, who has spent time thinking about his reading and who is keen to share his enthusiasms with the person he's talking with. 

Some of his critical work may now be dated, but the Allegory of Love and the Discarded Image can still be read with profit, as can his essays. 

I read that sentence and agreed. Good books reward rereading. Great poems need to be reread because what you get the first time through is never the whole experience. It might almost be a criteria. 

 But at the same time as I agreed, the sentence seemed dated, At first I thought it was the choice of pronoun. Today we'd find a more inclusive term.....

But then I realised that what really dates Lewis's statement are two assumptions.

The first is that that there are books which are the common heritage of any educated English speaker regardless of race gender or class. And that reading Malory, or Tristram Shandy is what a literate reader, interested in a thing called literature, should be doing. 

The second is that reading 'difficult books' is good for you.

 In a world where the AI can produce a synopsis, where you can google 'What is Tristram Shandy about' and get a two sentence answer, or buy The Idiots Notes for Unthinking People who can't be bothered to read the book but what to sound as though they have'... 

The assumption that an educated person will have reread books or authors seems quaintly old fashioned. 

Why read 'literature'. The Pope's answer

 Leaving aside the problem of defining 'literature' as against 'books'.

I've heard and read many claims for the power of literature over the years. As an English teacher one can't escape them. But one of the most rational is the Pope's, in his 

LETTER OF HIS HOLINESS POPE FRANCIS
ON THE ROLE OF LITERATURE IN FORMATION

which you can read in full by clicking on the link.

It's a year old. And his Holiness is addressing the role of literature in the training of priests, but what he says seems valid  even if you aren't a believer. 

At a time when banning books, or at least objecting virulently to those that show behaviours or beliefs people don't like, or censoring or rewriting books where characters speak or act in ways that are 'unacceptable' for one reason or another to somebody today, the Pope's letter offers a [?surprisingly?] different approach.  These three paragraphs stand out for me:

38. Literature is not relativistic; it does not strip us of values. The symbolic representation of good and evil, of truth and falsehood, as realities that in literature take the form of individuals and collective historical events, does not dispense from moral judgement but prevents us from blind or superficial condemnation. As Jesus tells us, “Why do you see the speck in your neighbour’s eye, but do not notice the log in your own eye?” (Mt 7:3).

39. In reading about violence, narrowness or frailty on the part of others, we have an opportunity to reflect on our own experiences of these realities. By opening up to the reader a broader view of the grandeur and misery of human experience, literature teaches us patience in trying to understanding others, humility in approaching complex situations, meekness in our judgement of individuals and sensitivity to our human condition. Judgement is certainly needed, but we must never forget its limited scope. Judgement must never issue in a death sentence, eliminating persons or suppressing our humanity for the sake of a soulless absolutizing of the law.

40. The wisdom born of literature instils in the reader greater perspective, a sense of limits, the ability to value experience over cognitive and critical thinking, and to embrace a poverty that brings extraordinary riches. By acknowledging the futility and perhaps even the impossibility of reducing the mystery of the world and humanity to a dualistic polarity of true vs false or right vs wrong, the reader accepts the responsibility of passing judgement, not as a means of domination, but rather as an impetus towards greater listening. And at the same time, a readiness to partake in the extraordinary richness of a history which is due to the presence of the Spirit, but is also given as a grace, an unpredictable and incomprehensible event that does not depend on human activity, but redefines our humanity in terms of hope for salvation.

My Grandmother's story, Poems I've written #2

My Grandmother’s Story

We hadn’t been there long. 

That night, we blew the candles out

said our prayers and went to bed.

 

Hobnailed boots on cobblestones

in the dark outside the window

heading down the garden to the shed.

 

There were no cobblestones

outside the window, just an 

overgrown, untended flower bed.

 

But every night: the unmistakable

familiar sounds of hobnails

on the cobbles, heading for the shed.

 

My dad, he told us not to be so daft.

He hated seeing garden go to waste

so dug, ignoring what the neighbors said. 

 

Beneath the window, down a foot, or less, 

he scraped his spade on cobblestones. 

Looking up, he saw where they had led. 

 

Well, lord, you can imagine

we didn’t sleep that night.

Father was right middling upset.

 

Even more so when he found

what was beneath the floor boards

in the garden shed.

 

I first heard my English Grandmother (see previous post) tell this story when I was still in primary school.  Much later I asked my aunt about it and heard the 'explanation': what they found under the floor boards and how it got there and whose hobnailed boots were walking on the cobbles.

But this is the story as I first heard it, converted into verse.  

First published in Under the Radar, and then in the book Rough Spun to Close Weave. 

Copies of Rough Spun to Closeweave are still available from the shop at www.liamguilar.com

Grandmothers. Poems I've written #1

 Looking at old poems, trying to work out what still works. 

Grandmothers

 

No one told the women in my family 

they were the weaker sex.

My grandmothers, worn by the century,

were beautiful, resilient and humane. 

 

My English gran survived 

both husband and the Blitz

and treated those disasters 

much the same.

 

One daughter asked:

‘If Hitler comes, what shall we do?’

‘Leave him to me,’ she said, 

‘I’ll sort the blighter out.’

 

Published in Lady Godiva and Me.  Available direct from the shop on Lulu , from other online book sellers or direct from the shop at www.liamguilar.com

Praise for the Fabled third #2

 

(David McCooey, Australian poet and critic, on The Fabled Third and its predecessors. Email correspondence, published here with his kind permission.)

‘I love the sense of mood in all of your work. I love, too, your skill with, and attention to, the sonic condition of poetry (not something often talked about these days). Like this:

A dappled grey horse, huge,
its rider dressed for the hunt,
in fawn-coloured clothes,
horn slung around his neck,
watching him from the trees.
A bent note in the rustle of the forest.

 What superb vowel music. And then there is, of course, your historical imagination. I love moments like the footnote on ‘gebedda’. Your skill with narrative and image is often, to use a hackneyed term, cinematic. (I’m thinking especially of when you start and end a scene.) And lastly, though not finally, as a work of intertextuality, I am in awe of the knowledge and adaptation skills evident in your trilogy.

Congratulations on the trilogy; it’s an extraordinary achievement.’

( David’s most recent collection The Book of Falling, is published by Upswell Poetry. He is Professor of Literature and Writing at Deakin University.)

That brutal rejection letter

 The State Library of New South Wales published a photograph of this letter on facebook under the title 'Could this be the most brutal rejection letter of all time?'

It's certainly not the kind of letter you'd like to open and read. 

But the covering letter from Mr.  Meyer is lost, so we can't know if the writer of the rejection letter was reacting to something equally blunt,  and we don't know which poem he sent in, but having bought a copy of the book out of curiosity,  here's a specimen of Mr. Meyer's verse which is by no means untypical of those in the book.

F.C.Meyer

Lone Pine Tree

 

I was sitting under a tree

And feeling grand and free;

On the top, a lonely hill,

I laid then down, quite still.

 

Tired, weak, made me the walk-

I wished to have a talk

About the creation all around

And beauties all which had me bound.

 

I was sleeping in the shade

And dreaming of a crime so sad.

Somebody cried: Arrest him quickly!

I rose at one then feeling weakly.

 

Finished was that naughty dream

Where brains were all a meaning stream;

Kookaburras were fooling with me

And laughed; how did you like the Lone Pine Tree. 

By the standards of the 1920s, and by most modern standards, this is bad writing. But rather than kick the dead man’s ghost, it’s  interesting as a representative of a fashion in poetry. 

 

Why did someone who was literate, and must have read some published poetry, think this was worth publishing? Why was he so convinced by their quality, that despite that brutal rejection, he went on to pay for the publication of his poems. 

 

It’s a common phenomenon. There’s little money in poetry, and outside the tiny circle of readers and writers, very little public interest.  Why then do so many people want to see their bad poems published? And why can’t they evaluate the quality of their own writing? 

 

Everyone should write verse of some sort. It's a way of organising thought, or exploring a situation, or verbalising emotion. Written in a notebook and discovered after the author was dead, no one would criticise this poem. To do so would be unfair. It would be tantamount to criticising the heartfelt poem written for a loved one’s funeral.

 

The writer had an experience, he knew what it was, he wanted to record it. If it did what he needed it to do, then it is a 'successful poem' for him.

 

But offering it for for publication, he was making a claim that what he had written was worthy of a poetry-reading stranger's attention and money. He is also making the claim that these poems are available for scrutiny and criticism. 

 

It’s clear from the way the poem is written that the author didn’t care about communicating with his potential reader. He recalls an experience without making any attempt to give the reader enough information to either understand the experience or care about it. The writer dreamt about a crime in a ‘naughty dream’, but can’t be bothered  to explain what the crime was or in what way the dream was ‘naughty’. 

 

And I don’t understand how anyone with an interest in or knowledge of poetry could think this is a good poem. 

 

He hasn’t worked at it. Shade and sad do not rhyme. It isn’t that he hasn’t been ruthless enough at the self -editing stage, there can’t have been a self-editing stage.

 

Forget poetry, anyone who speaks English would recognise that ‘Tired weak made me the walk’ is bad English and it’s only justification is that it provides the rhyme on walk. 'Where brains were all a meaning stream' is not only bad English but incomprehensible.  

 

For reasons unknown, the writer doesn’t want to tell people about his experiences, he wants to tell his friends he is a poet. He has written ‘poems’. They have been published, And that seems all that matters.  Meyers was so determined to have his work in print that he covered the costs of publication, undeterred by that rejection letter. 

 

 The internet is awash with people suffering from the same disease, now able to publish their verse online. The metaphorical submission trays of editors across the globe are piled with similar verse. Badly written, cliched, derivative, self-absorbed, bizarre acts of non-communication. 

 

Why do so many people with little or no interest in poetry and poems or demonstrable talent in writing verse want to be claim the title ‘poet’?

It's an interesting phenomenon. 

 

That letter is blunt, and unusually rude. But the rejection is understandable.