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 

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

Who was King Arthur's father #2

The conventional answer is Uther Pendragon. But who was he and where did his story come from?

Early Welsh poetry and prose is a subject area where Angles should fear to tread. It is the province of specialists; I’m not one. 

 

But if we’re looking for the origin of Uther Pendragon then we have to go there. 

There are four broad possibilities. 

 

 

1)    Uther Pendragon was always Arthur’s father. This is so unlikely I’m just putting it here to be thorough.

2)    Geoffrey invented him. (This is also highly unlikely.)

3)    Uther is the result of a mis-translation. Either deliberate or otherwise.

4)    An Uther Pendragon existed in the Welsh Arthurian stories but may not have been Arthur’s Father. Geoffrey made the link, possibly due to option three.

 

 

The first option is so unlikely I won’t spend any time on it. The second could not be proven one way or the other.  

 

3) The Idea that Uther might be the result of a mistranslation or creative misunderstanding was floated by Perry. 

 

    ‘As to Uther Pendragon, whom Geoffrey credits with the begetting of Arthur, opinion is             divided as to whether there was a tradition about him or whether his name grew out of a             misunderstanding of the Welsh uthr, ‘terrible’. ‘

 

As an adjective, Uthr (Uthir) means: Fearful, dreadful, awful, terrible. tremendous, mighty, overbearing, cruel, wonderful, wondrous, astonishing, excellent. (GPC)

 

Generally in Welsh the adjective follows the noun it qualifies (not always, generally) so the meaning of something like Arthur mab uthr could be Arthur the terrible/wondrous child if uthr was read as an adjective or Arthur child/son of Uthr if uthr was read or mistaken for a proper noun.

 

In the world of the poems, such a misunderstanding would be easy. You can see this is something like the poem Mi a Wum. 

 

 

Mi a wum lle llas Llachev
mab Arthur, uthir ig kertev

ban ryeint brein ar crev

 

Nerys Ann Jones translates this as:

 

I have been where Llachau was slain

Son of Arthur, terrible in song

When ravens rushed to gore [or Croaked on Gore]

 

As she says, it is difficult to know whether the conventional praise uthir ig kertev applies to father son or both. But she thinks it is unlikely uthir here refers to Arthur’s father. She writes; ‘Oliver Padel (personal correspondence) wonders whether Geoffrey of Monmouth might possibly have invented Arthur’s patronym from some phrase such as this.’ 

 

However, while I like this option, and keeping in mind the nightmare of dating these early references, an Uthur appears fully fledged as Uthir Pendragon in the poem Pa Gur and in Triad 28. 

He’s not named as Arthur’s father in either. 

In Pa Gur, one of the characters with Arthur is identified as:

 

Mabon, son of Modron,

The servant of Uthir Pendragon.

 

He also appears in triad 28.

 

Triad 28

Three great enchantments of the Island of Britain: 

The enchantment of Math son of Mathonwy (which he taught to Gwydion Son of Don) and the enchantment of Uthyr Pendragon (which he taught to Menw son of Teirgwaedd) and the enchantment of Gwythelyn the Dwarf which he taught to Coll son of Collfrewy his nephew.)

 

So against the idea that Geoffrey misunderstood or just seized on an idea, can be set Rachel’s Bromwich’s observation: ‘These references [to an early Uthur/Uthr/Uthyr/Uthir], taken together show that Uthyr was known in the pre-Geoffrey Arthurian tradition but they do not prove that, prior to HRB, he was known as Arthur’s father.’  p513

 

Bromwich also pointed out that in the story Culuwch and Olwen, Menw m. Teirgwaedd is distinguished as a shapeshifter and speculates that Uther’s ‘enchantment’ may have been shapeshifting. 

 

This in turn opens yet another possibility that the shape shifting conception story may have existed before Geoffrey, and the role of Merlin in Arthur’s conception is Geoffrey’s addition. 

 

However, if Geoffrey took an Uthur Pendragon and made him Arthur’s father, he seems to have misunderstood ‘Pendragon’. As we shall see he takes it literarily as ‘Head of the Dragon’ or ‘Dragon’s Head’…Bromwich was convinced that it would more likely have been ‘foremost leader’ or ‘chief of the warriors’. Dragon/draig appear in the early poetry as an accepted euphemism for ‘warriors’. 

 

So, with mind’s spinning joyfully, we can move onto firmer ground and the story of Uther as it appears in Geoffrey of Monmouth. 

(See previous post on this topic re references)

'Ruins', the story of Vortigern, is published in Long Poem Magazine spring 2020

'Ruins' is a long poem, 7 pages long, which tells versions of the story of Vortigern.

 In the 6th century, the remnants of a broken army, fleeing for the Welsh hills, find shelter in a ruined villa. To get through the night they tell the story of Vortigern and the Fall of Britain. But they have also found an old man hiding in the ruins, and he is adamant that he was a participant in the story they are telling. His version of events does not agree with theirs.

For someone interested in stories and storytelling there was so much to play with.

Although written to stand alone, 'Ruins' is the overture to a full length story of Vortigern, which will follow on from 'A Presentment of Englishry' (Shearman 2019).

You can hear a reading of an earlier attempt at this here: The poetry voice Podcast

Alan Garner Conclusion

The original  attempt to explain why I admire Alan Garner's writing was split over four blog posts. Although it's a work in progress, now it’s hopefully integrated into something more coherent here: Alan Garner.  (Clicking on the link will take you to the complete version).  I’ve  changed the ending so it’s no longer a bad-tempered swipe at current ways of teaching literature but an attempt to explain why the later books are so impressive.  

Talking about the household Gods is always difficult. What I think is still missing from both attempts is how entertaining the books are. The story teller is not worth his place by the fire, in the hall or at the kitchen table, if he or she cannot juggle the multiple requirements of his role, and not the least of these is to entertain the audience. 

Reinventing the Long Narrative Poem 2/3: the experiment

Writing Anhaga 

This is the second of three posts about the writing of Anhaga. The full report will appear on the website when all three have been posted.  

Further details of the book can be found here.

Reinventing the Long Narrative Poem.

Part two: 

Initial observations.

How does a poem differ from prose?  Forget metaphor, simile, and all the things English Teachers inadvertently imply are specific to poetry.  You’ll find them in prose.  Poetry and prose are not a binary pair, more like two points on a line with an almost infinite number of stages between the extremes and if you keep going far enough in either direction you'll find yourself back where you started. 

The short list of technical differences, leaving aside set rhythm, which a lot of my examples didn’t use, might be; rhyme, enjambment, caesura, and the stanza break.

Rhyme will make your poem memorable. I can still recite The Shooting of Dan McGrew…but you’re going to have to be very good to write a long story using rhyme and not bore your reader or sound like you’ve stepped out of the 19^th century.  Several of the examples in my list are written in set rhyme schemes and they are not the ones I’d choose to copy. Besides, on its own it won’t really alter the story as story.

Stanza breaks however are intriguing.  Admittedly prose has chapters and paragraphs and sections with their own breaks. But as Kinney pointed out in her study of narrative poetry, stanzas create a tension between pause and forward movement. The stanza comes to an end, suggesting the reader should pause and consider the content, but the narrative moves on. Endstop your stanzas too heavily and movement between them becomes difficult for the reader.  Make them too fluid and the whole thing starts to blur. The problem is compounded in a sequence where the poems are of uneven length.

Then there’s what the comic books call the Gutter; the white space between the stanzas or poems the reader must move across. Hold on to that thought.

Finally, what we used to call ‘coreference’ could be exploited. Corefernce refers to aspects of a text which tie it together. In prose, we might think of pronoun usage and tenses, but there are different possibilities with poetry.  You could exploit sound and rhythm to suggest links between pieces of narrative information. Characters can be developed using syntax and frame of reference, which is something Joyce did so brilliantly, but also the poetic forms they use or are associated with.

The Experiment.

I’ve been wanting to do something with the Old English ‘The Wanderer’ for decades. A speaker seems to be in an open boat, alone, in winter.

I’ve always thought no one would be daft enough to venture out on the North Sea or the Atlantic in winter and therefore read the words as metaphor. This is what life is like…

But who ever produced the poem we have did a fine job of particularizing the image, so it reads like a first person account of a lived experience.

Metaphor or literal truth, or both?

It’s a familiar question when reading a single poem.  

Take that idea a step further.

In Anhaga Mr. Plod the Detective, is worn out by the case he can’t solve. One of his suspects, Carmilla, has begun visiting him every night and she is sucking him dry.

If this is a ‘realistic story’ this is a simple metaphor: he’s experiencing a sleepless night because of the case and thinking about it is draining his energy. He’s also noticed how attractive she is so the sexual overtones are deliberate.

But if this is a vampire story, then Carmilla is doing exactly what the words say she’s doing.

With an individual poem, this ambiguity would be quite normal and it would be something I'd want to try to control and limit. But what would happen if I started lining up poems where this is happening. Instead of readers stepping across the Gutter from one poem to another to have their initial decision about what is literal and what is a metaphor confirmed, what happens if you step across the Gutter and find another set of questions.

This would create a constant unresolved ‘undecidability’ between metaphor/symbol and narrative fact.  If it happens often enough would you get the illusion that there are several possible stories all working simultaneously?

In a story the generic markers tend to reassure us as to which reading is literal within the storyworld and which is metaphor.

As a simple example, if you’re watching a detective story, set in a version of the ‘real world’ that most of us live in; there are no vampires. In that context when someone says; ‘nobody believes in Vampires’, it’s a scornful dismissal of a silly idea. Anyone who disagrees is obviously delusional.

But if the detective is a character in a vampire film, then we all know the speaker is about to die.  Plot twists and genre benders aside, it’s usually clear how the line should be read at least on the second watching.

But if I multiply the generic possibilities, then something much more interesting seems to happen.

What constitutes ‘narrative information’ becomes ambiguous.

In fictional narratives we assume that the information we’re given usually has a purpose. We may not understand it until we get to the end of the story, but in a conventional prose narrative if the reader is told something, that information has some purpose in advancing the plot or establishing a character or setting a scene etc.

In life it’s not so clear. Significance is almost always retrospective. To look back you need a vantage point and the value of any event lies in the retrospective narrative thread we’re following.  Events of shattering significance in your personal life may have no importance to the narrative of your career. This doesn’t mean the narrative threads can’t get twisted together.

I was writing stories about a man who’d lost his memory, and was searching for his own coherent sense of self. After all, as Brooks pointed out, referring to Freud, we narrate ourselves into coherence, and when we can’t we’re in trouble.

If you’re ever met anyone who has lost his or her memory, or is suffering from dementia, you’ll know how tragic this is.

Rather than allow the reader to sit back and watch the narrator flounder, I wanted to put the reader in the same position. 

I wanted to destabilize the reader’s ability to define what is symbol and what is meant as fact. This is inherent in the detective story, where what constitutes evidence, where the significance of an utterance, is only revealed by the detective’s final summary.

But by multiplying the generic markers, the movement towards instability becomes exaggerated and removing the final summary beloved of all crime writers but epitomized by Agatha Christie’s Poirot takes out the final confirmation or revelation of significance.  

I wrote a back story for each of the different versions: A detective story, a vampire story, a strange fantasy of reincarnation and a psychological thriller about a man who has lost his memory.  I planned the sequence using an app I’d downloaded which allowed me to create nodes and trace different coloured lines between them.

It was very pretty. Part three to follow.