Stevie Smith (1902 -1971)

Looking at the fine poems Tom Clark has posted of Stevie Smith's work on his blog, Beyond The Pale, I had additional thoughts which then I realized were too cumbersome for even several comment boxes, so, although I am not as head-over-heels with Stevie, I do think she may just be the best of female English poets of the last century. (Although Denise Levertov once said to me: "At heart, I'm English".) Not that I wish to create thoughts of hierarchy, and there are 20th century American women poets who for me are "better" - broader in scope, in innovation. However, what Stevie did was to meld English "insouciance" with sardonicisms worthy of Bukowski, Dorothy Parker, Philip Larkin. Glenda Jackson, who portrayed her on the London stage and later in the film, "Stevie" did the best job of portraying a poet in film I can remember seeing. Smith's work is almost polar opposite to, say, the later work of American transatlantic poet H.D., and her greatest poem "Winter Love".

Smith's most famous poem is the brilliant "Not Waving But Drowning". She could be quite nasty, and this shines through, for example, in the 4 line anti-American poem "The Little Daughters of America" which condescending and snide tone was typical of the English sensibility from 1939 to Pearl Harbor. And even to this day. But her genius in her use of Englsh tone and diction makes the 4 liner into something amusing and yet not.

Admirals Curse-You and No-More
Set their compasses and sailed for war.

I am sorry that all the little daughters of America
Should be involved in a thing like this; upon my word.



She could be equally nasty to her own countrywomen. "This Englishwoman" is a 2 liner:

This Englishwoman is so refined
She has no bosom and no behind.



Like Patchen, she accompanies most of her poems with whimsical but hard-edged drawings, often as wry as the poems themselves.


She can, on the one hand, be capable of compassion, and when she turns her use of diction to this end, the result is moving in the most rational and most extraordinarily quintessential English way. Here for example, is the close, her "Envoi" as she calls it, of "A Soldier Dear to Us":

Tommy and Joey Porteous were killed in France. Now fifty years later
Basil has died of the shots he got in the shell crater
The shrapnel has worked its way round at last to his merry heart,
I write this
For a memorial of the soldier dear to us he was.


Bitterness and psychic pain were modes she understood, note the poem "I Forgive You" and its revelations of resentment and pride, and condemnations of same encoded in the tone. In the drawing of the poem, Stevie has the woman lying on her sofa/bed in a state, and the man, frowning/unsmiling, sits on a small chair and says to her:

I forgive you, Maria,
Things can never be the same,
But I forgive you, Maria,
Though I think you were to blame.
I can never forget
But I forgive you, Maria,
Kindly remember that.


Then there is this, "The Broken Heart":

He told me he loved me,
He gave me red roses,
Twelve crimson roses
As red as my blood.

The roses he gave me,
The roses are withered,
Twelve crimson roses
As red as my blood.

The roses are withered,
But here on my breast, far
Redder than they is
The red of my heart's blood.

He told me he loved me,
He gave me red roses,
Twelve crimson roses
As red as my blood.


She withdrew considerably in her life, living with her aunt and their cats (of whom she wrote lovingly in her trademark quirky manner). Here, in "My Cats" she seems to morph into a witch:

I like to toss him up and down
A heavy cat weighs half a Crown
With a hey do diddle my cat Brown.

I like to pinch him on the sly
When nobody is passing by
With a hey do diddle my cat Fry.

I like to ruffle up his pride
And watch him skip and turn aside
With a hey do diddle my cat Hyde.

Hey Brown and Fry and Hyde my cats
That sit on tombstone for your mats.

She and her "lion Aunt" lived in a semi-detached house at the end of a row of houses, in what was then a NE London straight-laced suburb. Born in Hull (Yorkshire), her father left to pursue a career at sea, and her mother died when Stevie and her older sister were quite young. Her aunt raised her, moving the family to Avondale Road, Palmers Green. "A House Of Mercy" Stevie calls it. Here are three stanzas from the poem:

It was a house of female habitation,
Two ladies fair inhabited the house,
And they were brave. For although fear knocked loud
Upon the door, and said he must come in,
They did not let him in.

There were also two feeble babes, two girls,
That Mrs. S. had by her husband had,
He soon left and went away to sea,
Nor sent them money, nor came home again
Except to borrow back
His Naval Officer's Wife's Allowance from Mrs S.
Who gave it to him at once, she thought she should.

Now I am old and I tend my mother's sister
The noble aunt who so long tended us.
Faithful and True her name is. Tranquil.
Also Sardonic. And I tend the house.


She chose not to meet up (at least not in time) with Sylvia Plath, one of her great fans, who had written to her in Nov. 1962; just a few months later Plath was gone. No one really cared for Plath that winter in London; she was just thought of as the ditsy American wife of the poet Larkin called "The Hulk". The poem "Mabel" is undoubtedly about Plath, written shortly after her suicide:

In her loneliness Mabel
Found the hiss of the umlit gas
Companionable
And in a little time, dying
Sublime.


Stevie lost all of her Jewish friends after the publication, pre-world war 2, of "Novel On Yellow Paper" due to the careless and perhaps not even conscious anti-semitism which was then and now so ingrained in the English sensibility (brilliantly delineated by Philip Roth in his "Christendom" chapter of his novel "The Counterlife"). She insisted she never meant anything by it.

In "Voice From The Tomb #4" she wrote, echoing Dickinson at the beginning, with a touch of Sir Thomas Wyatt at the close:

I died for lack of company
Did my dear friends not know?
Oh why would they not speak to me
Yet said they loved me so?


She claimed she wanted interruption from her solitude in her discursive longish poem "Thoughts about the Person from Porlock" offering aesthetic distance from her loneliness in her bemused thoughts of Coleridge. Other exceptional narratives include "The Frog Prince" which inverts the fairy-tale/myth, and "Angel Boley" which deals with child murder, based on a 1966 case. The pathos of failed love is a recurrent theme, as in "Pad,pad":

I always remember your beautiful flowers
And the beautiful kimono you wore
When you sat on the couch
With that tigerish crouch
And told me you loved me no more.

What I cannot remember is how I felt when you were unkind
All I know is, if you were unkind now I should not mind.
Ah me, the power to feel exaggerated, angry and sad
The years have taken from me. Softly I go now, pad pad.


As Frances Spaulding points out in her excellent "critical biography" titled simply "Stevie Smith" (Faber and Faber, 1988), she was drawn out of isolation in the 1960's, more often than not by Michael Horovitz, to read at his various events and gatherings of a Bohemian nature often bringing poetry and jazz into closer communion. As Spaulding also notes, she was able to "imbue her work with, Seamus Heaney argues, 'a sense of pity for what is infringed and unfulfilled.' The tragic note sounded in her work is, however, made buoyant by a humour that keeps despair at bay; breezy commonsense, shrewdness and stoicism combat melancholy. Nevertheless her stark moral sense denied her comforting illusions and drove her to confront stupidity and cruelty, loneliness and loss." The poems "invite laughter" but they "are not frivolous" - are "dechirant" as the critic for "The Listener" (17 October 1957) remarked, and it is not surprising that "no amount of sociability could veil her isolation."


And at the end of her life, in what we would call hospice, suffering from a brain tumor:

I feel ill. What can the matter be?
I'd ask God to have pity on me
But I turn to the one I know, and say:
Come, Death, and carry me away.

Ah me, sweet Death, you are the only god
Who comes as a servant when he is called, you know,
Listen then to this sound I make, it is sharp,
Come Death. Do not be slow.

Remembering Mike Waterson, a born storyteller

guardian.co.uk

To see this story with its related links on the guardian.co.uk site, go to http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2011/jun/22/mike-waterson-remembered (by Colin Irwin)

Remembering Mike Waterson, a born storyteller

The singer, who died on Tuesday, had a passionate belief in folk song as a voice for the true values of the working class

guardian.co.uk

http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/musicblog/2011/jun/22/mike-waterson-remembered by Colin Irwin.....

Anybody with even a passing interest in British folk music will be choked by news of the death of Mike Waterson, who passed away on Tuesday.

Not only was he one of the great interpreters of traditional song, throwing himself into a narrative with all the mannerisms and instinctive inflections of a born storyteller, he was a master of wordplay, writing what he would self-effacingly describe as "ditties", whether Rubber Band ("We're the band to catapult to stardom/ We'll never get wound up, we're never slack") from his classic 1972 album Bright Phoebus with sister Lal; or the celebrated A Stitch in Time, inspired by a newspaper story he'd read that describes, in delicious detail, the highly ingenious revenge of a battered wife who sews her drunken husband into his bed while he's asleep.

Even last August, already looking alarmingly frail on one of his final stage appearances at the Waterson family's emotional homecoming gig at Hull's Truck Theatre, he still managed to steal the show when baggy brown jumper, trademark flat cap, pint of ale in hand he giggled like a naughty schoolboy and sang his latest masterpiece Tea's Made, hilariously pillorying drinks machines: "The milk is in small saches that you can't get in no-how/ And it tastes of burning plastic and it's never seen a cow/ So do not use this cafe/ Join the picket line with me/ Then they'll have to find a robot/ To drink their fucking tea. "

In the obituaries that will follow over the next few days, Mike will quite rightly be heralded as one of the key figures of the British folk revival for his long-running role in the Watersons, the Yorkshire singing family whose dynamic voices and instinctive harmonies galvanised the nascent folk scene back in the day and whose early career was guided by the great folklorist Bert Lloyd. "He asked us to sing a song once, which we did, and then he asked us to sing it again," Mike told me, recalling early days with his sisters Lal and Norma. "When he asked us to do it yet again we said are we doing it wrong? He said: 'No, it's pure indulgence because it's giving me so much enjoyment.' He told us we had wonderful mixolydian harmonies. We all looked at eachother and when we got home we went to Hull Library to find out what it meant."

With his long dark hair, sullen looks and scrawny physique, he was the coolest looking bloke on the planet back then. Check out the brilliant Derrick Knight documentary Travelling for a Living from 1965 and you'll see a dude who makes Liam Gallagher look like Val Doonican. No wonder the Watersons were dubbed "the folk Beatles". But, like the rest of his family, Mike never had any interest in fame or celebrity. He was a great singer with a passionate belief in folk song as a voice for the true values of working-class men and women and his main motivation was to put that music back in the hands of local communities. When the rigours of touring took its toll, he was quite happy to give it all up to paint houses and build boats, quietly knocking out his "ditties", living in a farmhouse in north Yorkshire and rejoining the family on their odd musical adventure.

A couple of years I spent a magical afternoon with Mike and Norma Waterson in Robin Hood's Bay where the pair of them bickered affectionately about everything under the sun, from rising stars of the modern folk scene to widely divergent memories of Eliza Ward, the grandmother who raised them after their parents both died young. The anecdotes were long and rambling, the images colourful and vivid and the opinions sharp and passionate. And now Norma is slowly recovering from major illness and Mike is gone. It's good to know a new generation of Waterson-Carthys has emerged to carry the baton, but the sense of loss today is still immeasurable.

Mandelstam, Akhmatova, Pasternak

Could Pasternak have saved Mandelstam from his arrest and exile which broke his physical and perhaps his mental health even prior to the extremes of poverty he and his wife suffered after his release and before his second arrest and subsequent death in 1938? Anna Akhmatova is ambivalent on this point but wonders about it in her essay on Mandelstam in MY HALF CENTURY, her selected prose, (Ardis Publishers, Ann Arbor, 1992).

"At the close of his letter to Stalin, Bukharin wrote: 'And Pasternak is worried as well.' Stalin stated that an order had been issued so that everything would be put right for Mandelstam. Stalin asked Pasternak why he hadn't exerted himself on Mandelstam's behalf, saying, 'If my friend were in trouble, I would do everything to help him.' Pasternak replied that if he hadn't done anything, Stalin would not have found out about the matter. 'But why didn't you turn to me or to the writers' organizations?' 'The writers' organizations haven't been involved in matters like this since 1927.' 'But isn't he your friend?' Pasternak hesitated and after a brief pause Stalin continued his queston, 'But he's a master, isn't he?' Pasternak answered, 'That's beside the point.' Pasternak thought that Stalin was testing whether he knew about the poems and that was his explanation for his shaky answers. 'Why are we spending all our time talking about Mandelstam? I've wanted to have a chat with you for a long time.' 'About what?' 'About life and death.' And Stalin hung up." (pp. 102-103)

She goes on to say (footnoted p. 375) that "Everything about this phone call requires the utmost scrutiny." Akhmatova also notes that Zina, Pasternak's wife, "hated the Mandelstams with a passion and thought they had compromised her 'loyal husband.' "



Well, who knows what one would do in a situation when you could be imprisoned, tortured, killed. Pasternak may well have been trying to save his own skin, in addition to aggrandizing himself and insinuating himself further into Stalin's good graces. It happens all the time, this cowardice, dissembling, back-scratching, brown-nosing among writers and poets, reference the recent controversies surrounding the actions of the young Milan Kundera. Or the egregious example of Gunter Grass in his Waffen SS days.

Or the refusal of poets in London to help organzise, provide a venue for, or even, out of fear, attend any readings in support of Salman Rushdie after the fatwa was issued.

W.B. Yeats, WHAT THEN; G.M. Hopkins, SPRING AND FALL

(Here's a poem by Yeats, written 1937, which speaks to me.)           His chosen comrades thought at school He must grow a famous man; He thought the same and lived by rule, All his twenties crammed with toil; "What then?" sang Plato's ghost.  "What then?" Everything he wrote was read, After certain years he won Sufficient money for his need, Friends that have been friends indeed; "What then"? sang Plato's ghost.  "What then?"   All his happier dreams came true - A small old house, wife, daughter, son, Grounds where plum and cabbage grew, Poets and Wits about him drew; "What then?" sang Plato's ghost.  "What then?"   'The work is done,' grown old he thought, 'According to my boyish plan; Let the fools rage, I swerved in naught, Something to perfection brought' ; But louder sang that ghost, "What then?"

and this, by Hopkins (with thanks to C.F. for reminding me of this poem decades ago)


SPRING AND FALL


to a young child


MARGARET, are you grieving
Over goldengrove unleaving?
Leaves like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Ah! as the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sorrow's springs are the same.
Nor mouth had, no not mind, expressed
What heart heard of, ghost guessed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.

Camille Claudel

Auden, schoolboy Marxist, writes that he "pardons" Paul Claudel, and doubtless thought nothing of his idol, Eliot, imprisoning Vivienne in an insane asylum for life, as did Claudel his sister. Hugh MacDiarmid, in a different context, wrote:

In spite of all their kind some elements of worth
With difficulty persist here and there on earth.



i.m. Marie Balvet

Potiche

As much homage to the joie de vivre of the late Eric Rohmer as to the Jacques Demy/Michel Legrand classic Les Parapluies de Cherbourg, Francois Ozon's charming and quite radical and poetic film, Potiche, stars the iconic Catherine Deneuve, and Gerard Depardieu, carrying well his weight and his brawler's face.

It used to be that Hollywood made sophisticated, intelligent, even intellectual and subversive rom-com, but that was long ago in the days of Tracy/Hepburn, Frank Capra, Preston Sturges. With the death of Larry Gelbart, and except for Woody Allen's brilliant edginess, American film comedy now is geared to what is lower than the lowest common denominator.

Although Casablanca among other American movies remains my sentimental favorite, the most outstanding films are more often than not, French. From Les Enfants Du Paradis, still possibly the greatest film ever made, through Cocteau's Orphee, to J.P. Melville's noir, to early Godard and the nouvelle vague, revolutionizing both cinematic technique and substance, form and content, it is clear that the finest achievments in French cinema are unsurpassed, matched only by the best of Welles, Fellini, Bergman, Kurosawa.

Following the second generation of nouvelle vague directors: Jean-Jacques Beneix (director of David Goodis' The Moon In The Gutter) and Luc Besson, his work spiralling downward after Subway, and Nikita, and Leon: The Professional (perhaps because that film, Natalie Portman's first, was panned, unfairly, by just about every American film critic as paedophilia), Ozon's films might emerge as a third stage of French film-making development after Godard, Truffaut, Resnais, and their colleagues, although Potiche is simply a lovely light-hearted (yet simultaneously serious) divertissement. And Catherine Deneuve luminous as always.

IKIRU REDUX

Just as foreign visitors to the U.S. East Coast don't go touring around the disgrace to governance which is Camden, New Jersey, or the wasteland bits of Filthadelphia across the polluted Delaware river, Americans visiting Barcelona don't see any parts of that city inhabited by the characters of Inarritu's film BIUTIFUL. In fact, most Americans abroad are content to shut their eyes to poverty and oppression, just as they do in the homeland. Just as Woody Allen did when he filmed his London-based comedies, or his Barcelona one. Not a lot of laughs in squalor. Film-makers who choose to shoot abroad do so for the same reason as corporations outsource their jobs, and also of course to have a holiday.

This remake of the Kurosawa film is relentlessly sad, haunting, and frightening, and as other film critics have done, I recommend it primarily for the bravura performance of Javier Bardem, and, in fact, the superbly riveting acting of all of the cast under the direction of Inarritu, one of the "three amigos" of contemporary Mexican cinema. Most serious non-English language films are better than 90% of the movies coming from Hollywood studios, although the rubbish is lapped-up by Americans desirous of innocence (etymologically the same as ignorance) and anti-intellectual entertainment.

The film would have been even better (though more uncompromisingly severe) if it had not copped out with its "Miracle in Milan" (De Sica) coda. Bardem seems (consciously or not) to have channeled to great effect, after his illness in the film takes hold, the Dustin Hoffman walk of the Ratso Rizzo character in "Midnight Cowboy". If it were not for Bardem's box office appeal, BIUTIFUL would be more than a bit much for American audiences, who are more and more dumbed-down with rom-com, simulated violence, big-money sports, and celebrity worship as the years pass. That certainly makes it easier to control the populace and ensure that there is no significant political discourse, just personal and corporate greed, which, as long as it still trickles-down, like a golden shower, to enough of the masses, keeps the "loose confederation of millionaires and billionaires" securely in power and makes mockery of democracy.

Living as I have done for fifteen years on a south Jersey barrier island, one island away from the notoriously twee Ocean City, I was curious as to why, in one scene, Bardem conspicuously wears an Ocean City, NJ, sweatshirt. I'm not sure if there's a reason for this. I would doubt it has anything to do with Ocean City being the place where Grace Kelly's family maintained a summer home well over 50 years ago.

The people who live in the world of BIUTIFUL are as recognizable as the people who sleep under the Boardwalks here, or in homeless shelters on Absecon Island, where the monstrous casinos of Atlantic City at this island's north end provide a backdrop to a place which "caters to losers" as the late writer and my good friend, Christopher Cook Gilmore, once put it; or who huddle against the biting cold winds on iron grates under which the subway roars in the decaying city where I was born and raised, and which was America's first capital. There is no "Homage to Catalonia" in BIUTIFUL, just a compelling naturalistic exploration of what our world is becoming.

Guahan

(for ongoing information, read The Drowning Mermaid blog.)

Photos released in campaign to save uncontacted Amazonian tribe | Environment | guardian.co.uk

Photos released in campaign to save uncontacted Amazonian tribe | Environment | guardian.co.uk



You (we) who live now on U.S. coasts : is your Boardwalk of Amazon wood, the taking of which contributes to little holocaust after little holocaust. I was on the Amazon River for a week a decade ago. How beautiful, and how magical the appearance and then the disappearance back into the Rainforest of the People.

& the Caboclos people, people of the river, perhaps like Twain's people of the Mississipppi 150 years ago.

Earth may become as Rapa Nui was. The last trees cut to move the Moai into place. Money has become our Moai.



One morning you awaken and suddenly you are on the Amazon. Then one day a few days later, awaken again, and it is a dream, a dream of the Amazon!

We go down some small tributaries to a lake area where there is some local settlement. Here the kids in canoes bring their pets to show: a sloth, small parrot, snake, monkey, - like cats or dogs....They seem to come from nowhere, to appear suddenly from some sacred river places to which they then disappear.


Saw two stray thin white cats near the little park down by the Manaus harbour docks at night while wandering around the city. I had wanted to feed them.

Made In Dagenham / Another Year

MADE IN DAGENHAM is an uplifting counterpoint to the bitterly accurate portrayals of working-class life presented by Mike Leigh, for example, in his great film, VERA DRAKE. "We make a lot of films about the working-class in Britain" the director of MADE IN DAGENHAM, Nigel Cole, notes, "but they are often laments, complaints, or simply bleak." In the great heyday of British cinema, there was Saturday Night And Sunday Morning, The Loneliness Of The Long-Distance Runner, and Billy Liar, to name but three. The latter introduced Julie Christie in her breakout role as everyone's archetypal 1960's woman, playing off against Tom Courtenay's stay-at-home Northerner.

Iain Sinclair's essay, The Raging Peloton, in the current (January 20th) issue of London Review Of Books, makes a good companion-piece to Made In Dagenham, dealing as it does with cultural history, politics, and the relation of the bicycle to faux socialism.

We see the plethora of bicycles coming and going from the Ford Dagenham factory, pedalled by the workers there who could not afford a car. With the inimitable Bob Hoskins taking a lead role with Sally Hawkins and an excellent supporting cast including Miranda Richardson as Barbara Castle, MADE IN DAGENHAM is an unsentimental look at the way of life effectively destroyed by Margaret Thatcher and the Tories before Tony Blair, selling out the Labour Party's socialist ideals in order to take power, buried it forever.

The mode is resurrected some in Mike Leigh's most recent masterwork, ANOTHER YEAR, his film of middle Britain's no-exit misery, with the best-we-can-hope-for almost cartoon "happy marriage" of Tom and Gerri, sunk into their soggy allotment, and with their goody-goody son and his sudsy-extrovert occupational therapist girlfriend, balanced against denial, dysfunction, disappointment, despair and death, with a stunning performance by Lesley Manville as Mary, in the throes of her lonely, sad, and drunken descent, and by all of the Leigh ensemble. ANOTHER YEAR is a kind of British response to Eric Rohmer's Parisian up-beat joie de vivre if you will, a take, as Leigh has said on "how to give love and affection" without going over-the-top, which is to say, stiff-upper-lip, have a chat, and drink your tea.

MADE IN DAGENHAM is, despite its one Dickensian death, an attempt at a feel-good well-paced feminist movie which pulls no punches in its Retro look at UK life during the time when most Americans regarded Britain only through the superficial lens of "swinging London" and music for export and Carnaby Street fashion hype.

BLACK SWAN

Clearly the film of the year. Just this side of schlock, it is, nevertheless, an Aronofsky original, assimilating the obvious influence of THE RED SHOES (the Powell-Pressburger master-take on the Diagelev-Nijinsky relationship, with Anton Walbrook and the wonderful Moira Shearer) and the less-obvious influence of Polanski's REPULSION. The most knowledgeable and the best review so far was by Roger Ebert, accessible on his website. Probably, in the future, BLACK SWAN will be released as a DVD double with THE WRESTLER.

It is a film exploring the nature of artistic genius, dedication and commitment, and its relation to psychological imbalance and madness. It is a must-see for any involved in the creative process, or any serious cineaste.

The Zen archer dissolves the target, and great art is not a matter of technique and craft alone, but of inner vision. Sophocles' Oedipus blinding himself, Bunuel and Dali slicing the eye, VanGogh severing his ear to try to silence the Meniere's. Baudelaire's "derangement", Ahab's "I'd strike the sun if he insulted me", Lawrence's dark gods, the "riot in the soul" from which some, like Conrad, via Marlowe stepping back from the abyss saying "the horror! the horror!" or Melville's Ishmael, are given to witness, and some, like Hart Crane, or Tsvetaeva, or Sa Carneiro are not. This is no Romantic notion of suffering for one's art, but a compulsive necessity to unleash the psyche, to go to that place where, as Yeats would have it: "who can tell the dancer from the dance"...

Frost, DESERT PLACES; Edward Thomas, 13.1.17

Snow falling and night falling fast, oh, fast
In a field I looked into going past,
And the ground almost covered smooth in snow,
But a few weeds and stubble showing last.

The woods around it have it - it is theirs.
All animals are smothered in their lairs.
I am too absent-spirited to count;
The loneliness includes me unawares.

And lonely as it is, that loneliness
Will be more lonely ere it will be less -
A blanker whiteness of benighted snow
With no expression, nothing to express.

They cannot scare me with their empty spaces
Between stars - on stars where no human race is.
I have it in me so much nearer home
To scare myself with my own desert places.





The sorrow of true love is a great sorrow
And true love parting blackens a bright morrow;
Yet almost they equal joys, since their despair
Is but hope blinded by its tears, and clear
Above the storm the heavens wait to be seen.
But greater sorrow from less love has been
That can mistake lack of despair for hope
And knows not tempest and the perfect scope
Of summer, but a frozen drizzzle perpetual
Of drops that from remorse and pity fall
And cannot ever shine in the sun or thaw,
Removed eternally from the sun's law.




That was Thomas's last poem (or at least the last one we have) before he was killed by an artillary shell blast at the Battle of Arras. It is numbered #144 in THE COLLECTED POEMS AND WAR DIARY, 1917 (Faber and Faber, 2004).


Edward Thomas was Robert Frost's best friend. Frost mourned him all of his life, much as Henry James mourned the death of his friend, Robert Louis Stevenson.

The Friends of Edith Piaf

Tens of thousands
-Red-winged blackbirds-
Falling from the sky

If we Americans believe the current
explanations being floated - i.e. it
was fireworks, it was lightning,
it was the birds' poor eyesight,
then we absolutely deserve
a future POTUS
far to the right
of Palin or Huckabee





(ps. March 10th) millions upon millions of sardines dead at Redondo Beach Harbor. The official explanation: They all "got lost" and ended up here where they depleted the oxygen in the water.

Trudy Pitts

Unfortunately, sadly, Philadelphia's "musical treasure" - "the best-kept secret in jazz" - pianist and organist, Trudy Pitts, has passed.

When I lived in Philadelphia in the mid-1980's and early '90's, I went to hear Bill Carney (her husband, drummer and vocalist) and whatever other fine musician was featured with them and the resident bassist that day, in the Meiji-En now legendary Sunday jazz brunches, and, before that, at Jewel's, my favorite jazz club, on North Broad Street. She was always just terrific "never a boast or a see-here" and her solo CD, produced by Mr. C, and titled "Me, Myself and I" is beautiful and forever.

excerpts: from George Oppen and Charles Olson

Oppen, from section 27, "Of Being Numerous"



It is difficult now to speak of poetry ---

about those who have recognized the range of choice or
those who have lived within the life they were born to---.It
is not precisely a question of profundity but a different order
of experience. One would have to tell what happens in a life,
what choices present themselves, what the world is for us,
what happens in time, what thought is in the course of a life
and therefore what art is, and the isolation of the actual


* * * * *


One must not come to feel that he has a thousand threads in his hands,
He must somehow see the one thing;
This is the level of art
There are other levels
But there is no other level of art








Olson, from "Only the Red Fox, Only the Crow"

We shall not know, but you
remember this: the two-edged worth
of loveliness
The night's for talking and for kissing

And when, on summer field
two horses run for joy
like figures on a beach
your mind will find us,
as we have found,
within its reach.

This, then, under the leaves
or under snow,
you who come after us,
we send you for envoy:
make most of love.

Jim Carroll: reviews of THE PETTING ZOO

> The knives are out for Jim Carroll now that he is dead.  The two reviews I have read so far of Carroll's posthumous novel, THE PETTING ZOO, are beyond simply negative.  It is incomprehensible to me how one can be jealous of a dead man.  Both reviews of Carroll's novel are infested with obvious jealousy, and the most recent one, by Richard Hell (nee Meyers), in THE NY TIMES BOOK REVIEW (Dec. 12th) demonstrates only how in U.S. literary culture an unintelligent third-rate hustler is able to spew his shite into a major publication.  If you think this is harsh, note just one sentence from Hell's venomness diatribe.  "Carroll was a continuous generator of entertaining anecdotes featuring himself.  It beat working."  Or, as Hell writes in the "review": the book is "clumsy... the characters  seem like puppets and the sentences often lumpy...a mess."   The other review I have read, by Thomas Mallon in THE NEW YORKER, hides its venom more successfully, but in sentences like "this new book seems depressingly unnecessary" and in the closing paragraph: "...Carroll was at his desk, ransacking the exhausted imagination inside his vanishing body, surely knowing that its very real gifts had long been spent" one can see how this self-described "libertarian Republican"  who is proud of his photos with Cheney and Bush wishes he had one iota of Carroll's genius.  These resentful  "reviews" read much like Charles Simic's rant against Robert Creeley, after Creeley's death, published in NY REVIEW OF BOOKS. (Responses to which @ www.omoopart3.blogspot.com - 2007/10/17, and www.omoopart4.blogspot.com - June 28, 2008.)     Patti Smith wrote a brief introduction to THE PETTING ZOO, and the blurb from her fine "note to the reader" excerpted on the back cover sets a different tone: "In the monastic seclusion of his room, Jim Carroll, with a prescience of his own mortality, reached out and drew this novel - his last work - from the nucleus of his mysticism and remembered experience."

(N.B. 28 Dec. The most well-balanced and the fairest review I have read is by Susanna Sonnenberg in The San Francisco Chronicle, 26 Dec.)

bear facts in new jersey

one week open season for (not, unfortunately, on) bear-killers began yesterday in new jersey. 7000 permits to kill were issued. each permit holder is allowed to kill one bear. there are, supposedly, about 3000 bears living in new jersey. however, that figure is of unconfirmed bear sightings people called in. as the website "tiny green bubble" notes: "in a state that is notorious for big hair on women and bear like hair all over men, certainly some form of sighting confirmation should be made before assuming that the hairy thing crossing the street by the nail salon was a bear and not just someone's husband." 265 bears were killed the first day. there were many "nuisance" complaints this past year of bears rummaging for food. no human injuries were reported, however. the last person to be killed by a bear in new jersey was in 1870. new jersey superior and supreme court judges refused to grant the bears a stay of execution. new jersey judges have also ruled that the number of protesters at wildlife sites must be limited to 25.

the new jersey deer cull is scheduled to begin in January.

self-aggrandizement

Some links, recommendations, brief notes on poetry, film, and other matters (including a few photos and a video of my reading of an excerpt from David Goodis's novel DOWN THERE, filmed by Truffaut as SHOOT THE PIANO PLAYER), are on my Facebook site. Several reviews on amazon.com - including WAY MORE WEST by Ed Dorn, THE DOOR AT TALDIR by Paul Evans, BALLAD OF JAMIE ALLAN by Tom Pickard, THE SEPARATE ROSE by Neruda, THE BLUE HOUR (a new biography of Jean Rhys) - and a review of Lyn Lifshin's book, RUFFIAN, on amazon.co.uk.

2 Arabic & 2 Persian love poems

(2 translations from the Arabic by Michael A. Sells)

from Ibn Arabi's TRANSLATOR OF DESIRES (Ibis Editions, 2000)


"Lords Of Love"

I wish I knew if they knew
whose heart they have taken

Or my heart knew
which high-ridge track they follow.

Do you picture them safe
or do you picture them perished?

The lords of love in love
are ensnared, bewildered.




from "Bid Hurayra Farewell" by Al-A'sha (Desert Tracings - Six Classic Arabian Odes -Wesleyan, 1989)



Bid Hurayra farewell.
The riders are departing.
Can you, man that you are,
bear bidding farewell?

Brow aglow, hair flowing,
a gleam from the side teeth as she smiles,
she walks gently as a gazelle,
tender-hoofed in wet soil,

As if her walk
from the tent of a neighbor
were the gliding of a cloud
neither slow nor hurried.

You hear her anklets whisper
as she turns away
like cassia rustling
suppliant in the breeze.

She's not one of those
whose neighbors hate to see her face.
You won't find her,
ear to their secrets, listening.

She braces herself
or she'd be thrown back flat
when rising to visit a neighbor,
by languor.

She entertains her companion awhile,
then slackens,
lower back and buttocks
quivering,

Full at the bodice
at the waist sash nil,
a belle, seeming as she comes near
to divide in two.

How sweet a bedmate
on a cloudy afternoon,
not for some unbathed rude
to lay and take some pleasure,

Wide-hipped, delicate,
elbows soft, walk tender,
as if a thorn were caught
in the arch of her sandal.

As she rises
a fragrance of musk trails,
her sleeve-cuffs with the scent
of rose jasmine brimming over.

No meadow of the meadows
of the roughland plateau,
luxuriant and green, blessed
by dark-trailing big-dropped clouds,

When the sun is teased
by a blosssom in full flower,
drenched in color,
mantled deep in rushes and greens,

Is ever more fragrant,
more redolent
than she, or more beautiful
when evening shadows fall.






Rumi (from THE MASNAVI - Book One)

translated by Jawid Mojaddedi (OUP, 2004)


(from "The Healing Of The Sick Slave Girl")

Being a lover means your heart must ache,
No sickness hurts as much as when hearts break,
The lover's ailment's totally unique,
Love is the astrolabe of all we seek,
Whether you feel divine or earthly love,
Ultimately we're destined for above.
To capture love whatever words I say
Make me ashamed when love arrives my way,
While explanation sometimes makes things clear
True love through silence only one can hear:
The pen would smoothly write the things it knew
But when it came to love it split in two,
A donkey stuck in mud is logic's fate,
Love's nature only love can demonstrate:



(from "The Song Of The Reed")

Love's fire is what makes every reed-flute pine,
Love's fervour thus lends potency to wine;
The reed consoles those forced to be apart,
Its notes will lift the veil upon your heart,
Where's antidote or poison like its song,
Or confidant, or one who's pined so long?
This reed relates a tortuous path ahead,
Recalls the love with which Majnun's heart bled:
The few who hear the truths the reed has sung
Have lost their wits so they can speak this tongue.
The day is wasted if it's spent in grief,
Consumed by burning aches without relief -
Good times have long passed, but we couldn't care
When you're with us, our friend beyond compare!
While ordinary men on drops can thrive
A fish needs oceans daily to survive:
The way the ripe must feel the raw can't tell,
My speech must be concise, and so farewell!

Homage to Tony Judt

All organized religion is either evil or leads to evil.  I used to think that after a millenia or two, religious leaders and their faithful followers might settle down some and we wouldn't have something like the Inquisition or Holocaust repeated, but I was disabused of this notion when Israel turned to institutional terror, and Jewish people, especially in the U.S., became blinkered about Zionism.  It is true in my opinion, as Alan Sillitoe had noted, that too often anti-Israeli pro Palestinian mouthings are anti-Semitism by the back door, but that does not excuse the ugliness of things when an oppressed people become the oppressor, as here in the U.S., the early settlers, after achieving Independence, began to systematically attempt to eliminate Indian tribes.  Fueled by a strangely quick and for the most part unanticipated economic meltdown, white liberal guilt, a monolithic black vote, and the righteous disgust with years of Republican domination, Obama became our President.  Despite his primary skill, sophism, and a quick intelligence easily mistaken for intellectualism due to the fact that the U.S. is controlled on all levels by lawyers ("laws written by lawbreakers"), the military and police, investment banking honchos/dishonest business entrepreneurs and others of that cultureless ilk, many did believe that a more humane country would emerge.  With eight years of Bush and Cheney and cohorts no one expected anything other than crony capitalism favoring wealth, oil, and war-mongering.  But even a slight amelioration, which is what Zizek said was the best we could hope for, has in no way occurred.  The latest wrongheadedness on the part of the President is his approval of the mosque complex.  I for one do not believe that Islam is a religion of peace.  The Koran is filled with vicious anti-Semitism which cannot be excused as something merely historical.  Leaving aside similarites with evangelical Christianity, with both Moslems and Christians slaughtering each other for centuries in the name of holiness, what we have today is a continued incursion of Arab oil money moving West adjacent to the very spot in New York where so many were killed. Non-Muslims cannot even visit Mecca; what would Islamic leaders say if President Obama asked for a church or synagogue or inter-faith complex to be built there? It is the duty of every Muslim, as stated in the Koran, to convert unbelievers, by the sword if necessary.  More oppressive of women than any other religion in history, the mad mullahs, ignorant imams and their lackeys, especially in Iran, desire to Torquemada the world.  Obama's approving the mosque is another one of his errors in the name of a more forgiving country.  Perhaps he would like to have al-Megrahi dedicate the mosque?  A year now since his release at the behest of Scots nationalists (betraying the ideals of Wallace) working with New Labour corrupt Blairites (indistinguishable from Tories, really), and BP, and their deals in Libya dependent on said release.  As one blogger put it: "Of course there is freedom of religion in the U.S. and the idea of discriminating against a particular religion offends our fundamental values.  But it is a separate question whether the plan to build a mosque is a good one that persons of good will should choose to pursue as they exercise the freedom they are most assuredly guaranteed."  The problem is not simply the wishy-washyness of Obama and centrist republicrats, nor the greed-laden legacies of the Clintons, but the continued lowering of consciousness in America.  There was hue and cry raised by people when Obama called for a moratorium on drilling for six months.  Gulf residents have become dependent on the filth of oil revenue. Health care scams, millionaire doctors, billions for bloated research leading nowhere, big pharma, and insurance companies continue unabated despite the illusion of progress generated by the self-congratulatory smugness of the self-serving congress and their Uriah Heeps.  I don't believe there is an answer.  "There is a plague called man."  To use a convenient myth, we were chucked out of Eden and a return to a pre-lapsarian state is not possible.  We could, of course, be a little kinder to each other.

PS & N.B. ... (August 16th).....Even the name "Cordoba Initiative" shows disrespect and intolerance to all who are not of Islam. It is deception (and self-deception on the part of Muslims) to believe that the Muslim army hordes who invaded and conquered and occupied the Iberian peninsula in the Middle Ages for several centuries before finally being driven out, had established some sort of "golden age" in Spain. The "conviviencia" as it is sometimes called was a golden age only for Muslims, everyone else being a second-class citizen at best. The leading Judaic thinker (Maimonides) and the leading poet (Halevi) both were forced to flee Islamic Spain in fear of their lives. Scholars and historians today disagree as to the extent of the oppression in Cordoba, but there is general agreement that towards the end of the occupation it was little more than slaughter of non-believers and a prelude to the horrors of the Inquisition which followed.

Merwin's THE FOLDING CLIFFS, etc.

--- This is a letter sent to Susan Schultz, editor of the poetry journal, Tinfish, which she publishes from Oahu, where she works as a professor at the U. of Hawaii at Manoa.      dear Susan,   i am sorry to impose on your time yet again, but i was quite dismayed by part of your recent blogpost (july 26th) criticizing as "appropriation" the magisterial, deep, ennobling and great work by W.S. Merwin, THE FOLDING CLIFFS (Knopf, 1998), which i consider a masterpiece not just of late 20th century American poetry, but one which as Ted Hughes noted, is "an original masterpiece on a very big scale"....   i did read with interest the links on your blog, in particular the link to the rather nasty (even jealous) deconstruction of THE FOLDING CLIFFS a decade ago (which i had not seen previously) by Kapalai ula de Silva.  you should note that it is absolutely incorrect of de Silva to say that Merwin does not acknowledge the major source of his meditative narrative.  he clearly states that he read the translation by Frances Frazier of Pi'ilani's story, and of course his poem is dedicated to Olivia Breitha, whose own little-known book, MY LIFE OF EXILE IN KALAUPAPA, (of which i blogposted about 5 years ago - Dec. 2, 2005: www.iprefernotto.blogspot.com), when i read it on Molokai, caused me to weep.  well, i am sentimental; i don't apologize for that.    nor do i apologize for believing that when Haunani-Kay Trask (whose writing in other contexts (i.e. her book LIGHT IN THE CREVICE NEVER SEEN) and which i also blogposted on @iprefernotto, and like very much) writes (in your other link) that "Hawaiian culture is our culture.  It does not belong to everyone but only to us" that that is cultural fascism which i distrust and resist.  in fact, i think it typical of many Kanaka Maoli in Hawaii, to be so resentful, and in fact this goes completely against the grain of Polynesian sensibility, certainly in the islands south of the equator, which, despite all the horrors inflicted on the people there (far moreso than in Hawaii in point of fact) remains open and warm and sans the xenophobia which seems to exist in Hawaii, sad to say.     you don't of course speak for the people of Oahu or of Hawaii so it is wrong of you to say that Merwin's extraordinary poem (and i do not know Merwin personally so i have no ax to grind in his defense except a poetic one) "was seen here as an act of appropriation" unless by "here" you simply refer to the academic world of Manoa.  you use the word quite negatively as you must know; would you also say that the lovely short film, KALUAIKOOLAU, made by the Ke Kula Ni'ihau O Kekaha Learning Center, is also an act of "appropriation"?

be well... aloha.....

Jose Saramago..... (1922-2010)..... (R.I.P.)

"The man at the ship's wheel looked for the cleaning woman, but couldn't see her, Perhaps she's in the bunk to starboard, resting after scrubbing the deck, he thought, but he was deceiving himself, because he knows perfectly well, although again he doesn't know how he knows, that, at the last moment, she chose not to come, that she jumped onto the quay, shouting, Goodbye, goodbye, since you only have eyes for the unknown island, I'm leaving, and it wasn't true, right now his eyes are searching for her and do not find her. At that moment, the sky clouded over and it began to rain, and, having rained, innumerable plants began to sprout from the rows of sacks filled with earth lined up along the bulwarks, they are there not because of fears that there will not be enough soil on the unknown island, but because in that way one can gain time, the day we arrive, all we will have to do is transplant the fruit trees, sow the seeds from the miniature wheat fields ripening here, and decorate the flower beds with the flowers that will bloom from these buds. The man at the wheel asks the sailors resting on the deck if they can see any uninhabited islands yet, and they say they can see no islands at all, uninhabited or otherwise, but that they are considering disembarking on the first bit of inhabited land that appears, as long as there is a port where the ship can anchor, a tavern where they can drink and a bed to frolic in, since there's no room to do so here, with so many people crowded together. But what about the unknown island, asked the man at the wheel, The unknown island doesn't exist, except as an idea in your head, the king's geographers went to look at the maps and declared that it's been years since there have been any unknown islands, You should have stayed in the city, then, instead of hindering my voyage, We were looking for a better place to live and decided to take advantage of your journey, You're not sailors, We never were, I won't be able to sail this ship all alone, You should have thought of that before asking the king to give it to you, the sea won't teach you how to sail. Then the man at the wheel saw land in the distance and tried to sail straight past, pretending it was the mirage of another land, an image that had traveled across space from the other side of the world, but the men who had never been sailors protested, they said that was where they wanted to disembark, This island's on the map, they cried, we'll kill you if you don't take us there. Then, of its own accord, the caravel turned its prow toward land, entered the port and drew alongside the quay. You can leave, said the man at the wheel, and they immediately all trooped off, first the women, then the men, but they did not leave alone, they took the oxen, the donkeys and the horses, and even the seagulls, one after the other, flew off, leaving the boat behind, carrying their nestlings in their beaks, something never seen before, but there's always a first time. The man at the wheel watched this exodus in silence, he did nothing to hold back those who were abandoning him, at least they had left him the trees, the wheat and the flowers, as well as the climbing plants that were twining round the masts and festooning the ship's sides. In the rush to leave, the sacks of earth had split and spilled open, so that the whole deck had become a field, dug and sown, with just a little more rain there should be a good harvest. Ever since the voyage to the unknown island began, we have not seen the man at the wheel eat, that must be because he is dreaming, and if in his dreams he fancies a bit of bread or an apple, it would be pure invention, nothing more. The roots from the trees are now penetrating the frame of the ship itself, it won't be long before these hoisted sails cease to be needed, the wind will just have to catch the crown of the trees and the caravel will set off for its destination. It is a forest that sails and bobs upon the waves, a forest where, quite how no one knows, birds have begun to sing, they must have been hidden somewhere and suddenly decided to emerge into the light, perhaps because the wheat field is ripening and needs harvesting. Then the man locked his ship's wheel and went down to the field with a sickle in his hand, and when he had cut down the first few ears, he saw a shadow beside his shadow. He woke up with his arms about the cleaning woman, and her arms about him, their bodies and their bunks fused into one, so that no one can tell any more if this is port or starboard. Then, as soon as the sun had risen, the man and the woman went to paint in white letters on both sides of the prow the name that the caravel still lacked. Around midday, with the tide, The Unknown Island finally set to sea, in search of itself."

Oggsford

As the rather Shylockian character of Meyer Wolfsheim in The Great Gatsby refers to the University..........

Ed Dorn in his long poem titled "Oxford" from his early book The North Atlantic Turbine (Fulcrum, 1967), writes in part V:

..........But I said everything ?
has been talked about
around Oxford. I was assured
it had been. I didn't say while walking
but I thought well then make up!
something! Because baby if you don't
they's gonna take all your wine away
they's gonna turn you into a state
institootion and you'll all be working
for the state just like in America
and you'll have to prove
you're useful, the most useless
sort of proof you'll ever have to make
------------------------------
you'd better at least start digging up
some hills
to talk about. Get laid, describe that.
the world seems endlessly interested.




The election for the Oxford Professorship of Poetry is being held now. Although Geoffrey Hill appears to be the front-runner, those eligible to vote could surprise the establishment by choosing a long-shot who is in the running, Britain's foremost Beat/post-Beat poet, Michael Horovitz.

Horovitz is the only poet except for Allen Ginsberg to have read at both the 1965 Royal Albert Hall reading, and the follow-up thirty years later in 1995. Still an active poet, performer, independent publisher, poetry entrepreneur, organizer and troubadour, his 1969 Penguin anthology, Poetry of the 'Underground' in Britain, remains one of the best collections of the alternative and innovative.

His own work continues to demonstrate a Blakean seriousness of purpose tempered with a kind intelligence and wit. Here is a brief excerpt from his elegy, published in Wordsounds And Sightlines (New Departures, 1994), for his wife, Frances, herself a fine and sensitive poet:

Night after night your muse's breath
in the trees and scrubs comes calling,
tugs me away from habit and routine
- owl cries swoop in on reveries
calling back a secret music,
the unfinished symphony
of your life and work
- how it steals upon the senses
stately, flowing, clear - the sabbath of
your poetry's leaves

What Obama Could Do

(1) Fire Salazar and all of his epigone underlings at Interior who continued past administrations' corrupt policies of refusing to regulate permits and safety procedures. Appointing him Secretary of the Interior in the first place was like putting the fox in charge of the hen house.

(2) Order his crony, the Attorney-General (who called America "a nation of cowards" in his Feb. '09 race-in-your-face speech), to issue arrest warrants for the executives of BP in addition to the CEO's of Transocean and Halliburton, and an international arrest and extradition warrant for the billionaire Chairman of BP, Carl-Henric Svanberg, sitting on his derriere in Sweden saying things to the press like "BP is big and important...The U.S. needs BP just as much as BP needs U.S. business." Since, realistically speaking, he cannot freeze all BP assets and nationalize all oil companies operating in the U.S., he could at least expropriate and comandeer every scientific and tecnhological honcho of all oil companies, who are doubtless praising Mammon that they don't work for BP, and perhaps, just perhaps, one of them knows of and is sitting on a solution which BP does not have, if the "top kill" fails.

(3) Demonstrate some humility and compassion.

F.R. Leavis at Gregynog, Wales, 1969

"By the close of the 17th century the conditions of Shakespeare's kind of greatness had vanished for good. Shakespeare could be at one and the same time the supreme Renaissance poet and draw as no one since has ever done on the resources of human experience, the diverse continuities, behind and implicit in a rich and robustly creative vernacular. By 1700 a transformation as momentous as any associated with the development of modern civilization had taken place, never to be reversed. The new Augustan culture represented by Pope and The Tatler entailed an unprecedented insulation of the 'polite' from the popular. There could be no reversal: the industrial revolution, which by the end of the 18th century was well advanced, worked and went on working inevitable destruction upon the inherited civilization of the people. Dickens was the last great writer to enjoy something of the Shakespearian advantage....What has been achieved in our time is the complete destruction of that general diffused creativity which maintains the life and continuity of a culture. For the industrial masses their work has no human meaning in itself and offers no satisfying interest; they save their living for their leisure, of which they have very much more than their predecessors of the Dickensian world had, but don't know how to use it, except inertly....But it is fatal to let the cultural inertness of the technological age spread and prevail till everything else is forgotten and incredible....What we are rapidly heading for is the hopelessness of America."

Dr. David Craig, Lecturer at the University of Lancaster and a Marxist theoretician, asked Dr. Leavis "how can the man in the street be helped to appreciate literature?" Dr. Leavis' answer was that he did not believe that they could. The days are gone, he said, when Shakespeare was both an author esteemed by the intellectuals of the day, and the great national entertainment as well....The study of English literature, he said, should give people a sense of the continuity of our literature and this sense should be instilled through a whole range of studies in which mediaeval ideas and mediaeval texts should be as freely discussed as the moderns, so that in studying the mediaeval period we should become aware of of the mediaeval tradition behind the development of Shakespeare. It was only towards the end of the seventeenth century that the break came between popular and sophisticated literature.

"and the hippos were boiled in their tanks"

Hippopotamus on menu at Beijing zoo http://www.guardian.co.uk/environment/2010/may/21/exotic-animals-beijing-zoo-menu Visitors to Beijing zoo are warned not to feed the animals, but they are encouraged to eat them at a restaurant that offers crocodile and scorpion on its exotic menu. After watching the beasts in their cages, diners at the zoo's restaurant can gnaw on the webbed toes of a hippopotamus, chew a kangaroo tail, nibble a deer's penis or slurp down a bowl of ant soup. The sale of the dishes has caused outrage since it was reported by the Legal Daily newspaper earlier this week, with conservationists condemning the practice. "It is utterly inappropriate for a zoo to sell such items," said Ge Rui of the International Fund for Animal Welfare."One of the zoo's missions is to foster love of animals and a desire to protect them. But by selling the meat of caged beasts, this zoo stimulates consumption and increases pressure on the animals in the wild. It is socially irresponsible." Chang Jiwen, a legal expert at the China Academy of Social Sciences who is trying to draft an animal protection law, said: "Although it is legal, I don't think it is humanitarian. It is very inappropriate and immoral of them to sell such products. It is against the aim of the zoo." Online comment was also predominantly critical. "Watching animals imprisoned in a limited space while eating their siblings, how would you feel?" wrote Zheng Yuanjie, a famous Chinese writer, in his microblog. The owners of the Bin Feng Tang restaurant were unwilling to comment to the Guardian, but they have told domestic media that the meat was from exotic animal farms and its sale had been going on for several years with the full approval of the authorities. In the wake of the negative coverage, however, staff said they would be revising the menu, which also includes set dishes of scorpion, peacock, ostrich egg, shark fin soup and other delicacies for between 100 and 1,000 yuan. The criticism is a sign of changing times. In the past, notices on each of the zoo's animal cages included information about which parts were the tastiest and most useful according to traditional Chinese medicine. Those details have now been omitted. guardian.co.uk Copyright (c) Guardian News and Media Limited. 2010

Fascism and Modernism

"The development from Imagism in poetry to Fascism in politics is clear and unbroken." (Donald Davie, Purity Of Diction In English Verse, 1952.)

Pound, Eliot, Yeats: the three giants of first generation English language modernist poetry. Pound, late-in-life, recants his anti-semitism, saying to Allen Ginsberg at Spoleto, 1965, it was a "suburban prejudice" and, referring to The Cantos, "I botched it." Eliot, worse, was clever and pernicious, and he never recanted, but reaffirmed, cf. his letters to Leslie Fiedler.

In After Strange Gods (1934), Eliot wrote: "Reasons of race and religion make any large number of free-thinking Jews undesirable." He did omit this sentence in a reprint after WWII, but "Gerontion" and "Burbank..Bleistein" confirm his prejudices and embody them in his poetry, sneeringly. The best biographyof TSE is Carolyn Seymour-Jones' biography of Vivienne, which brings everything into the light of day, including his same-sex affairs, and his role in committing his wife to an insane asylum (probably, she suffered from Tourette's) and keeping her there, perhaps not just for reasons of his social embarrassments, but also to spend her inheritance, because she was declared incompetent. Also, as the major acknowledged arbiter of literary taste in Britain, with politics far to the right of, say, Philip Larkin, TSE wielded enough power to keep William Carlos Williams, for example, first published in the U.S. in 1909, out of the mainstream of UK publishing until 1964, one year after Williams's death. Eliot was keen as well to keep heterosexual poets well away from Faber and Faber, and other major publishers.

Marcus Klein, in his book Foreigners (1981) was the first to point out the extremes of Eliot's anti-semitism, and Anthony Julius devoted an entire book to the subject: T.S. ELIOT, ANTI-SEMITISM AND LITERARY FORM.

But et tu, Willy?! W.J. McCormack, Chief Librarian, Edward Worth Library, Dublin (and formerly Prof. of Literary History, Goldsmiths' College, U. of London) has written a most condemnatory text, BLOOD KINDRED: THE POLITICS OF W.B. YEATS. Yeats was never exactly "liberal" in his political views, but for the most part he managed to keep his politics out of his poetry; however, as is pointed out in his Letters it is clear what his real feelings were. He supported the 1930's German race laws passed at Nuremberg in 1935, and even went so far as to accept an award from the Third Reich, the Goethe-Plakette, from Oberburgermeister Krebs in 1934. He wrote ballads for the Blue Shirts, supported Mussolini in an interview in the Irish Times, describes democracy as "muck in the yard" during the Spanish Civil War, and refers to a "Negro girl who lived near Sligo" in his childhood, noting "she is among those our civilization must reject." (On The Boiler, 1939, p. 266) Writing to Olivia Shakespear about Germany in 1934, he says "what looks like emerging is Fascism modified by religion. This country is exciting."

As McCormack points out: "Irish paramilitary politics has displayed a steady right-wing bias, even when the rhetoric was socialist." Then there were the war years, and an alliance between the IRA and Nazi Germany. Yeats wrote of "Judaism's disappearance from the historical backyard of Christianity" Despite schoolmaster Deasy's comment in Ulysses alluding to Jews in Ireland, that we "never let them in" Jewish people were in 1943 10% of the population of Dublin and Cork. Never was there a public statement from Ireland on the issue of persecution in WWII. Orwell favorably reviewed Indian scholar V.K.N. Menon's THE DEVELOPMENT OF W.B. YEATS , a book pointing out the sinister side of Yeats' politics.

"He gave comfort to democracy's enemies, to decency's enemies, to the enemies of art and culture" writes McCormack, and continues "he was fascist on (for me) too many occasions. Perhaps the hurtfulness of this judgment should be tempered by the qualification that, on many of these, he was fascist by doing nothing (p. 433). He declines to act because he cites "the Irish nation as his one and only loyalty."

The Rest Is Noise as Alex Ross titles his his interesting study of the politics in and of modern music (2007).

2 poems by Patricia Clare Lamb

from her latest book, A LOSS FOR WORDS (Harbottle Press, Houston, Texas, 2009). THE LONG LOVE (new and collected poems 1957-1998) was issued by Harbottle in 1998. Pat Lamb is one of America's best and most under-rated poets.



All Lines Down

1 Kings 19:11-13



All roads being closed and all lines down,
You'll have to make your own
Language now. No one except the one
Who is himself the word can answer you.
(I preach what you've already proved is true.)
I pray you may have found
Peace amid the clamor, discipline
In the confusion, eloquence within
A tiny whispering sound.






I Want To Say


I want to say don't go, this is your spot,
But you are inching onward every day,
And what are we here for, if not to go?
You are changing even while I look
Across this trifling table and this unread book,
Going even as we say hello.
Say to the waters, stay,
And to the sea, change not.

The Pacific You Won't See On TV

MUST reading, especially for anyone who still believes it matters who the U.S. President is, or anyone who cares at all about Pacific island people: LIVING AT THE 'TIP OF THE SPEAR' by Koohan Paik in "The Nation" (May 3, pp. 26-28). Also recommended, the blog titled THE DROWNING MERMAID.

@ the Beach

Margate, NJ, resident Glenn Klotz (son of Red Klotz, the most important basketball icon and player not yet inducted into The Basketball Hall Of Fame), blogs on http://athebeach.blogspot.com. He usually adddresses local issues. Note his post for April 20th.

re: the hypocrisy of Barack Obama

They must be vermin, surely, who defile
Their very Homeland coasts, mile after mile.

-----James Norman Hall







Or is "hypocrisy" too strong a word. I have read that he never said he would not consider drilling for oil in the ocean. So were we gulled by "the art of the possible" - "poly-tiks" as Cid Corman used to put it....To get a "climate-change" bill through. More nuclear power stations. Just what we need.


(April 29th...In light of the catastrophe for sealife/birds/mammals as the oil spreads, will Obama rescind his energy policy in terms of East Coast drilling offshore? The Philadelphia Inquirer believes he should. I wonder if he can admit that he was wrong. He's been around clever lawyers much of his life, at least since leaving Honolulu. Is his intelligence less superficial than theirs? Come to think of it, I can't remember a single time when he admitted he was wrong about something.) (May 1st...Disconcerting that friends I've known for years and years bash me for criticising Obama (for whom I voted in the belief his Presidency would help Native peoples) saying this makes me a racist right-wing tea party nut, or at least aligns me with them.)

more of Melville

from "BILLY IN THE DARBIES"


..............................
They'll give me a nibble - bit o' biscuit ere I go.
Sure, a messmate will reach me the last parting cup;
But, turning heads away from the hoist and the belay,
Heaven knows who will have the running of me up!
No pipe to those halyards - But aren't it all sham?
A blur's in my eyes; it is dreaming that I am.
A hatchet to my hawser? All adrift to go?
The drum roll to grog, and Billy never know?
But Donald he has promised to stand by the plank;
So I'll shake a friendly hand ere I sink.
But - no! It is dead then I'll be, come to think.
I remember Taff the Welshman when he sank.
And his cheek it was like the budding pink.
But me they'll lash in hammock, drop me deep.
Fathoms down, fathoms down, how I'll dream fast asleep.
I feel it stealing now, Sentry, are you there?
Just ease these darbies at the wrist,
And roll me over fair!
I am sleepy, and the oozy weeds about me twist.




(Recommended reading: MELVILLE - His World And Work - by Andrew Delbanco)

THE GHOST WRITER : A Brief Take

No matter what your feelings about Roman Polanski, there is no denying he remains a world-class film-maker. THE GHOST WRITER is not a CHINATOWN (or a KNIFE IN THE WATER), but despite its biographically beyond improbable conclusion, it is an excellent film in the thriller (and Hitchcock) tradition, with a leitmotif of Billy Budd-like Innocence as a subtext, quite subtle and, since it is Polanski, consciously done, I would venture to say. Not to give anything away to spoil the viewer's enjoyment, but when the ghost writer is questioned before his release near the end of the film, he is asked if he had reported a certain conversation. He did not, and readers of Melville are reminded that it is that omission which allows Claggert to accuse Budd to Captain Vere. Not that THE GHOST WRITER is an allegory of any kind; however, when, in innocence, the writer lets the chief villains know he has discovered their secret, there can be then no way out.... And the great Eli Wallach delivers a marvellous cameo half-way through.
_______________

(And highly recomennded, for the serious cineaste only, Haneke's film THE WHITE RIBBON.)

dogs: the new weapon of choice

from Rowenna Davis in The Guardian : www.guardian.co.uk



(N.B. One more reason why it is becoming difficult to live in London....As I blogged in a former post on gangs and knife-crime, the police seem powerless to intervene on time. The days of the Bobby-on-the-Beat are long gone, along with bowler hats and Dixon of Dock Green.)



The number of dangerous dogs being seized by the police has soared as young people increasingly use them as 'weapons', rather than carrying knives.

Teaser is a 10-stone Staffordshire bull terrier cross-breed, flanked like a horse and with a head the size of a rugby ball. It lives in a small flat in Somers Town, central London, and local kids on the estate often knock and ask to walk it, amazed that the 22-year-old owner can make it sit and give paw. Many of the kids have their own dogs: staffie crosses, rottweilers, and illegal pit bulls and the numbers are multiplying as they are bred with other dogs on the estate.

"It's a status thing - one or two people get them and then everyone's got one," says CJ. "Kids think I've got a pit and I'm a hard man, but they're the ones running around estates being pulled on leads. [The dogs] keep spreading because they're so easy to get. Just go on to the internet and type in 'pit bull puppies'. It's not surprising everyone I know has a dog."

Yet a growing number of dog owners are irresponsible. In London, the number of dogs seized by the police under the Dangerous Dogs Act (DDA) soared from 263 in 2006-07 to 719 in 2008-09. So far this year, 1,000 dogs have been confiscated a fourfold increase in three years.

The act allows dogs to be seized because they are illegal, dangerously out of control, or if they are used to threaten or intimidate someone. So legal breeds, such as Staffordshires, can be seized under the act. Pit bull-type terriers, Japanese tosas, and the dogo Argentino and fila Brasileiro mastiffs are all illegal breeds, but many owners get around the rules by mixing illegal breeds with Staffordshires and calling them crosses.

The increase in seizures in London has been driven by a crackdown and the opening of a Metropolitan police Status Dogs Unit (SDU) last March, but national data suggests there has also been an increase in violent dogs on the street. According to the Ministry of Justice, the number of dog owners prosecuted for causing injury rose by 50% between 2003 and 2007. The RSPCA says that calls about dog fighting have increased massively over the last few years, with two-thirds of complaints now directly connected to young people using dogs as "weapons" in streets and parks.

A series of high-profile attacks have focused public attention on this issue. Last February, a baby died in south Wales after being attacked by a Staffordshire bull terrier and a Jack Russell. In November, four-year-old John Paul Massey was mauled to death by a pit bull in Liverpool. And just before Christmas, a guide dog was viciously attacked by another dog, whose young owner was walking it unleashed by in north London. CJ says that walking without a lead is too often used as a sign of power and control on the street. "I'm always paranoid that some dog off a lead is going to attack Teaser," he says.

David Grant, director of the RSPCA's Harmondsworth hospital in north London, picks up the pieces of irresponsible dog ownership every day. His hospital is full of emaciated staffies that have been abandoned often in the hospital's reception by young men who don't want to give their names or pay veterinary bills. Many of the dogs are sick, as their owners haven't had the money or the knowledge to apply for vaccinations. In the worst cases, dogs have been abused by irritated owners or been forced to fight.

In 40 years of practice, Grant, whose veterinary operations were seen by millions on the BBC's Animal Hospital television series, says things have never been so bad, and he has started documenting the worst cases. His computer now hold hundreds of images of dogs that have been shot, stabbed or burnt.

"A typical problem owner will be from an inner-city estate, unemployed, without any educational achievements," he says. "Young males predominate, although the fighters often register the dog in a girlfriend's name." Names such as Terror, Chaos, Killer, Ice and Asbo often tell a dog's story, says Grant, as does evidence of harnesses accessories often used to glamorise dogs before gang fights.

But Grant is keen not to sensationalise or oversimplify. He wants to distinguish between "fashion dogs", which are simply part of a craze, and "status dogs", which are bred for offence and defence. "Fashion dogs tend to be staffie crosses that are naturally good-natured, turning nasty only when they suffer abuse, or neglect when their owners get bored," he says. "Status dogs, on the other hand, are bred to intimidate. At the worst level, gangs will use them for mascots, muggings, safeguarding territory, and fighting enemies and other dogs."

Grant, along with dog wardens and police officers, has repeatedly drawn attention to the parallels between dogs and knives. Both are carried by young people in areas where crime is high, often for defence. In some cases, even parents have been known to encourage their children, particularly girls, to walk with dogs as a means of protection. However, in contrast to possession of knives, a young person will not face five years' imprisonment for having a dog.

But if fear and fashion are multiplying dog numbers, so is the potential money that unemployed young people can make from dog dealing. Staffordshire puppies and their crosses can sell for 400-500 each, and with an average litter size of eight and a bitch able to produce two litters a year, an owner can earn up to 8,000 annually from a single dog.

From his council flat in north London, Dion, 24, supplements his living by dealing dogs. He's got a few scars from violent dogs he's owned in the past, but now he's got just one, a mixture of a staffie-pit cross and a presa Canario. "My dog has had her first litter and two generations of grandchildren," he says. "I wanted to keep the bloodline going. The money's not the priority though. I'll sell them for half of the 350 I could get when I know they're going to a good home."

Security is another reason Dion hangs on to his dog. He says: "My dog attacked my stepdad once for good reason. He was a bit of an alcoholic, and when my sister got scared of him once she screamed and the dog went straight for him and shredded his forearm before he could hurt her. It's another reason to feel safer."

According to Sergeant Ian McParland, chief officer at the SDU, simply banning more dogs under the DDA is not the answer. The problem is not genetics, but upbringing, he says. Most dogs can become aggressive or peaceful, depending on how they're raised, he says.

"You could go on banning breeds until the cows come home and it won't make a difference," McParland says. "We're almost fortunate that the status dog of choice, the pit bull terrier, is illegal. I don't know what we'd do if Akitas, German shepherds and rottweilers started becoming fashionable [as status dogs]. Akitas were used by Samurai warriors."

He points out the threat posed by selective breeding. "Breeds are getting more dangerous," he says. "If you've got a nasty dog and your mate's got a nasty bitch, they're the ones you're going to breed."

So far, local authorities' response to the problem has been mixed. Last month, the London borough of Harrow proposed vetting and chipping all dogs owned by people waiting for social housing. Anyone with a dog that it suspected of being used for fighting would be refused a tenancy, though deputy council leader, Susan Hall, insisted that this would be a last resort. "We will work with the RSPCA and police to make sure that people in council properties don't keep dogs that are a menace to others," she said.

In south London, Wandsworth council is already piloting a programme that will see residents threatened with eviction if they fail to keep their dogs responsibly. Other London councils employ specialist dog wardens who are on call to answer residents' problems; others simply slide dog issues into the files of the resident environment officer.

In Liverpool, following the death of John Paul Massey, councillors voted for an amnesty on illegal dogs, free micro-chipping, and tougher rules on leads and muzzling. They are also investigating a dog registration scheme.

According to Grant, it will take more than punitive measures to curtail irresponsible dog ownership. "A lot of the time I feel as sorry for the owners as the dogs," he says. "These young men have been on a conveyor belt of social deprivation since the day they were born, and we're at the end of it, trying to pick up the pieces. They've had no upbringing, and they've got no educational qualifications and no prospects. Society has let them down. We need to address the root causes if we're going to solve these problems."

Back on estates in north London, young people are talking about breeds, bloods and lineages. Videos of dogfights recorded on mobiles are changing hands, and an old cage for dog fighting sits in a garage.

R.I.P. Michael Foot

(from www.guardian.co.uk - March 3rd)

Michael Foot, the most improbable literary romantic to lead a major British party since Benjamin Disraeli, has died at the age of 96 after a turbulent political career that left him a much-loved but also deeply controversial figure.

A brilliant orator, steeped in Swift, Byron, Shelley and the great political struggles of the 17th century, Foot was first an incorrigible rebel who helped foster the left-right Bevanite split that damaged Labour throughout the 50s. A champion of British unilateral nuclear disarmament, one of the left's great post-war causes, he gradually moved towards office in the economic crisis of 1974.

Foot led Labour from 1980 to 1983, presiding over the party during the formation of the breakaway SDP. He resigned after Labour fell to a stunning defeat in the 1983 election, the voters having rejected a manifesto later called the "longest suicide note in history".

In a statement, Gordon Brown said: "Michael Foot was a man of deep principle and passionate idealism and one of the most eloquent speakers Britain has ever heard.

"He was an indomitable figure who always stood up for his beliefs and whether people agreed with him or not they admired his character and his steadfastness."

Tony Benn, his cabinet colleague and occasional nemesis, added: "He was one of the great figures of the Labour movement."

Foot's gallant reputation and prestige kept the left and the unions on side during his time as Jim Callaghan's deputy PM in difficult years from 1976 to 1979. He was also accused of irresponsibility and ironically in view of his past of appeasement of the unions by resurgent Conservatives and some Labour MPs.

For others his idealism, which included a life-long devotion to Plymouth Argyle FC, was highly attractive. Despite the defeat of many of his most cherished causes, he had a rich and deeply fulfilled life, which he shared, until her death in 1999, with his beloved wife, the filmmaker Jill Craigie.

In the crisis that followed the defeat of the Callaghan government and the rise of Margaret Thatcher, Foot led the Labour party from 1980 to 1983, presiding over it during the formation of the breakaway Social Democratic Party (SDP), which used his election over Denis Healey as the excuse for their defection.

He stepped down in favour of his protege Neil Kinnock after Labour slumped to a stunning 145-seat defeat in the 1983 election in the wake of a manifesto that a Labour colleague called "the longest suicide note in history". It fell to Kinnock to rebuild his party and put it on the road to three election wins under Tony Blair. Foot, who refused all honours including a peerage, must often have been unhappy with Blair's leadership, but in old age loyalty to his party was a paramount consideration.

It was not always so. The frail child of a West Country Liberal dynasty, Foot was always a rebel, who hitched his star early to the charismatic Welsh ex-miner, Aneurin Bevan, whose admiring biographer he became. Their radical socialist views did not prevent either of them becoming allies of Lord Beaverbrook, the Canadian press tycoon, owner of the then-mighty Daily Express, who shared their sense of mischief.

A distinguished writer and journalist with a passion for literature as well as politics, Foot gained his first great claim to fame as the author of Guilty Men, the celebrated polemic against the pre-war appeasers in 1940. Beaverbrook entered Churchill's cabinet, Bevan attacked Churchill, and Foot briefly edited Beaverbrook's London Evening Standard though the leftwing weekly Tribune was his life's love.

Tribune helped set the tone for Labour's victory in 1945 when Foot, alone in his Liberal family, unexpectedly won Plymouth Devonport for Labour and became a Westminster gadfly. It was a role he maintained from outside after losing Devonport in 1955 and resumed after succeeding Bevan in Ebbw Vale after his hero's death in 1960.

Foot and Bevan fell out over Bevan's renunciation of unilateralism. But Foot followed his mighty heart for much of his career. His firm support of Indian independence led him to back his friend Indira Gandhi when she declared a state of emergency in the 70s. In the 60s he joined forces with Enoch Powell, with whom he shared the title of best parliamentary orator, to block Labour efforts to reform the Lords though he wanted it abolished, Powell wanted it left untouched.

Such quixotic behaviour prompted his old Oxford friend Barbara Castle to complain that he had "grown soft on a diet of soft options". But when Labour unexpectedly took power again in the global energy crisis and domestic crisis between Ted Heath's government and the miners Foot accepted the tough job of employment secretary under Harold Wilson. Under Jim Callaghan, as Labour lost its majority after 1977, he was leader of the Commons and deputy PM, fighting night after night to keep the government afloat.

Among his many gallant defeats of that period was the campaign in which seven cabinet ministers, including Foot, were allowed to fight for a "no" vote when Wilson offered voters a referendum on Britain's still-new EU membership in 1975. The yes camp which included Margaret Thatcher won by a ratio of 2:1.

He and Benn were not peas in the same pod and Foot felt personally betrayed when Benn insisted on contesting Healey's role as deputy Labour leader in 1981 a divisive contest that Healey narrowly won when young leftwingers like Kinnock refused to back Benn.

After his leadership Foot stayed in the Commons backing Kinnock against Militant entryism for which his earlier tolerance had been criticised, until 1992 when his protege lost the general election to John Major. But his passion for books, as for Plymouth Argyle, never dimmed as the infirmities of old age took their toll.

In the bloody 90s when Yugoslavia was torn by civil war Michael and Jill Foot went there and made a film on behalf of their beloved Dubrovnik. No puritan, Foot was fond of drink and laughter as well as ancient historical ports. It was a fitting last hurrah.

Eros Turannos by E.A. Robinson

She fears him, and will always ask
What fated her to choose him;
She meets in his engaging mask
All reasons to refuse him;
But what she meets and what she fears
Are less than are the downward years,
Drawn slowly to the foamless weirs
Of age, were she to lose him.

Between a blurred sagacity
That once had power to sound him,
And Love, that will not let him be
The Judas that she found him,
Her pride assuages her almost,
As if it were alone the cost.
He sees that he will not be lost,
And waits and looks around him.

A sense of ocean and old trees
Envelops and allures him;
Tradition, touching all he sees,
Beguiles and reassures him;
And all her doubts of what he says
Are dimmed with what she knows of days -
Till even prejudice delays
And fades, and she secures him.

The falling leaf inaugurates
The reign of her confusion;
The pounding wave reverberates
The dirge of her illusion;
And home, where passion lived and died,
Becomes a place where she can hide,
While all the town and harbor-side
Vibrate with her seclusion.

We tell you, tapping on our brows,
The story as it should be,
As if the story of a house
Were told or ever could be;
We'll have no kindly veil between
Her visions and those we have seen, -
As if we guessed what hers have been,
Or what they are or would be.

Meanwhile we do no harm; for they
That with a god have striven,
Not hearing much of what we say,
Take what the god has given;
Though like waves breaking it may be,
Or like a changed familiar tree,
Or like a stairway to the sea
Where down the blind are driven.




This post for all who have commented nastily/condescendingly/disparagingly on the late-life marriage of Lorine Niedecker.

Evils of Computer Technology

Destruction of the Romance of short-wave radio in the night from distant shores. The laying waste to the future of handwriting. An end to Letters. Post office closures. Pony Express gone forever with Henderson's Cyrenaican runners. "like to the man who was worthy of that city"

John Rety, 1930-2010 (R.I.P.)

My old friend, John Rety, died. Heart attack. He was the publisher of 2 of my books (Tahitian Journals, and Glimpses of India and Nepal) with the press in London (Kentish Town) he founded, Hearing Eye, which published over 150 books and chapbooks of poetry by a wide variety of mostly British authors. His Torriano weekly Sunday night poetry reading series flourished for over 20 years, and an anthology, IN THE COMPANY OF POETS, published some of the poets who read there. He lost most of his family to Hungarian Fascists in WWII, and as a teen he was sent to England, where he lived for all of his life. A political activist and serious anarchist, he actually chaired anarchist meetings at the Lamb and Flag pub, and during the 1960's edited FREEDOM, the British anarchist weekly newspaper. Always active in anti-war causes, he participated in the fast at Speakers' Corner, Hyde Park, in protest against the Vietnam War. He was a graded chess player, who played internationally on the British Seniors Team. Essayist, poet, translator of Hungarian poets, editor, publisher, and activist, John was also a great friend to the down-and-out. He is survived by his son, Jacob, and his son's mother, Laura; his wife, Susan, and their daughter Emily, and his grandchild. Deep condolences to his family and friends.