TOM CLARK: Fidelity / Melancholy Watch: The Downs (Keats leaves England, 1820) / Keats: "This living hand" (salvaged from the Deep Keats Scrolls) / Weston nearing the end... (Or Not)

"King Penguin singing": Two King Penguins (Aptenoydes patagonicus patagonicus), South Georgia Island: photo by Lt. Philip Hall, NOAA, 1994-95 (NOAA photo library)

Fidelity, after long practice, to
The things that have crossed one's path in life,
Moves one to find "history" in a morning,
A moonlit night, a transitory patch
Of sun upon grass, the turning of a cat's
Sleek head over its shoulder to look back
Into one's eyes, a lifelong lover's touch,
The memory of the shy sweet sidelong
Smile of a friend one may not see again
In "this life"--these things define home
To one now that one lives largely in one's mind--
As though there had ever been any other
Place -- once born, once having existed --
In which to somehow locate a world

Because brief hours before fadeout life becomes

A late awakening, much as one assumes
Is the experience of "lost" generations
Whose youth is turned back toward childhood by
Dreams; just so one's own dim youth now at last
Appears a kind of slumber from which the slow
Process of waking took a half century
Or so, as time now opens up its eyes,
Yawns, stretches, struggles in dark to discover
Where it is among whirling things, places, years.
But of course one will never fully emerge
From this fog, nor in one's heart wish to do so,
For mere excursions don't suffice on visits
To dead cities -- excavation too's required,
Cries out the hungry unborn poem
Within us, demanding to exist as
If alive

for Angelica x 50

King Penguins (Aptenoydes patagonicus patagonicus), East Falkland Island: photo by Ben Tubby, 18 March 2007

Magellanic Penguins, East Falkland Island: photo by Ben Tubby, 18 March 2007

A freshly hatched chick rests after strong efforts to break through the egg in the zoo in Frankfurt, Germany, Tuesday, Jan. 23, 2018.: photo by Michael Probst/AP, 23 January 2018

Melancholy Watch, The Downs (Keats leaves England, September 1820)

Jetty: Margate: Joseph Mallord William Turner (1775-1851), 1840s, watercolour over graphite pencil on paper, 23 x 32.8 cm (Museum of Fine Arts, Boston)

My melancholy watch, mid-quarter-deck,
Drifting: I follow the play of gulls.
The sun is long gone down, the east darkling,
The ship drifts. In the west, some brightness remains.
Momently there are two flights of gulls moving
One to the east into the dark and one
Out of the west, in the last rays of the sun,
Left and right so entirely dissimilar
That the name gull quite falls from them
As I watch, and the chiaroscuro
Of the evening is torn open, altering
Everything: so that now everything is
Only itself: the gulls, myself closer
In nature than if I still knew their name,
Yet at the same time moving farther out,
Sinking deeper into a fading sky
Which soaks them up like ink accepting water,
Coaxing darkness out of reluctant night,
Bringing on the abolition of that false
Identity which made naming possible.

TC: Melancholy Watch, the Downs (September 1820), from Junkets on a Sad Planet: Scenes from the Life of John Keats, 1994

Landscape with a River and a Bay in the Background: Joseph Mallord William Turner, c.1842, oil on canvas, 91 x 122 cm (Musée du Louvre, Paris)

Salvaged from the Deep Keats Scrolls (1987-2007)

I Negative Capability

II Want of an Object

III On First Looking into Chapman's Homer

IV Byron on Keats

Weston nearing the end... (Or Not)

Santa Anas -- Fire down south | by ADMurr

Santa Anas - Fire down south [Hollywood Hills]: photo by Andrew Murr, 11 February 2018

Blue 657 dingbat [LA]: photo by Andrew Murr, 11 February 2018

Or Not [Hollywood Hills]: photo by Andrew Murr, 2 February 2018

Geometry, debris [Eastside, LA]: photo by Andrew Murr, 9 February 2018

Secrets [Hollywood]: photo by Andrew Murr, 8 February 2018

Dabney's [south LA]: photo by Andrew Murr, 8 February 2018

Early evening off Hoover [south LA]: photo by Andrew Murr, 7 February 2018

37th Street [LA]: photo by Andrew Murr, 7 February 2018

The feed: photo by Andrew Murr, 6 February 2018

Succulents on a wall [Hollywood Hills]: photo by Andrew Murr, 6 February 2018

201 Aqua [Eastside, LA]: photo by Andrew Murr, 5 February 2018

Sears vanishing point [Santa Monica Boulevard, Hollywood]: photo by Andrew Murr, 5 February 2018

Palm frond antenna [Echo Park, LA]: photo by Andrew Murr, 4 February 2018

Untitled [LA]: photo by Andrew Murr, 4 February 2018

Park Ave. hotel [125th Street, NYC]: photo by Andrew Murr, 28 January 2018

Orange dress airport color |Travelers at Tokyo's in-town airport seemed to be playing "50 Shades of Grey" with their wardrobes -- grey, black and more grey. The folks from Garuda were a welcome, fully chromatic relief. [Garuda Airlines, Tokyo]: photo by Andrew Murr, 18 December 2016

Stop action, Orland, California | by ADMurr

Stop action, Orland, California: photo by Andrew Murr, 17 August 2017

People Investigating Sunset Blvd. | by Joey Z1

People investigating Sunset Blvd. | People investigating Sunset Blvd in the Silver Lake area of Los Angeles on a rather warm So. Cal winter day. This is at the intersection of Hyperion and Sunset Blvd. To the right is the infamous Black Cat!: photo by joey zanotti, 27 January 2017

Untitled [los angeles}: photo by live..simply, 11 February 2018

Albuquerque, New Mexico: photo by Jorge Guadalupe Lizárraga, 9 February 2018

Hate Is A Sin | NYC: photo by czolacz, 28 October 2017

Needles, Arizona: photo by Dean Terasaki, 17 October 2017

Terra Bella, CA: photo by Mike Murphy, 29 December 2017

Weston nearing the end... | by MichaelRyerson

Weston nearing the end... | Edward Weston, a year or two removed from Charis, shown here in a screen cap from a modest little USIA film on the photographer out scouting locations with an unnamed 'apprentice' (how appropriate) at the wheel. I frankly don't think Weston ever learned to drive, always depending on assistants or fellow photographers to get around. I could be wrong about that, just my impression. He is here quietly dealing with his recent divorce and a diagnosis of Parkinson's which will end his career this same year. Screen grab from The Photographer Edward Weston, 1948.: photo by Michael Ryerson, 11 February 2018

The turn: photo by YZ [Street], 31 May 2017

Please do not stand on the stairs! | by YZ [Street]

4 comments:

TC12 February 2018 at 01:23
Staple Singers: Uncloudy Day (1956)

#1 all time jan-mar 1968
x 50

Joe South: Games People Play (1969)

Lee Dorsey (covering Joe South): Games People Play (1969)

Lee Dorsey: Sneakin' Sally Through The Alley (1966)
tpw12 February 2018 at 06:22
Wonderful, contemplative poems that seem very 19th century and very contemporary at once. And those illustrated texts---part Blake/part Mark Alan Stamaty. Crazy & beautiful. Thanks, Tom.
Sandra12 February 2018 at 11:12
lovely poems...and penguins too !
TC12 February 2018 at 16:29
Thanks my sweet friends tpw and Sandra.

Terry, yes, very 19th, because in late 20th, all alone in my matchbox woodshed under the century tree hard by the Backwards Donner Party Take No Prisoners Expressway, I developed a curious sort of internal tic that produced poems in my earnest better-mousetrap Murican version of blank verse, as perfected in the early 19th by WW, only with the one (huge) difference, Murican isn't English, something has to be stinted, whether the accent count or, if you're crazy enough to be trying to derive a blank verse out of a nonaccentual language, some number of those little semi-enunciated garbage-mouthful hurry-up nonce-syllable clusters which make spoken Murican what it is; and since Murican really can't count its accents very well, because they are so weak and vary by user, and because moreover Murican is so very flat, and has lost all memory of the speech rhythms natural to English, it soon seemed wiser (easier?) to forget about accents altogether, and simply count syllables, and make a fixed syllable limit, with a little bit of wiggle room, so that I came to settle on the 9 to 11 line, in which I then wrote the poems... for oh, maybe 20 years or so...

Coming back now and considering this in light of yr astute comment, it's plain to me that the ersatz murican blank verse line I invented, really does sound kind of agéd, maybe this is just me, but within the flatness I hear a blankness, aha, that must be what I was after.

The one overriding good thing about having any kind of metric at all, for me, and I know you know this because all your poems have a subtle yet strong metric that's probably responsible for at least 51% of their genius, is that if you run out of gas in the middle of a line, you can at least just stop and start again later, and not be tempted (by the devil, of course) to allow yourself the easy way out, pretending to yourself that hey, maybe a little pseudo-innocent violation of the metric would be so easy get away with, nobody would ever notice. But then you remember that they would, because they are you.. if you are me.

If you get what I mean there, Dwight.

Sandra,

Well, you may have guessed the truth -- what all this is really about is simply the fact I love those Ben Tubby penguins so much, so very much, an image of group social interaction that seems utterly beautiful to me.

Also BTW the post commemorates my good fortune in having been wed 1/2 century ago to someone who ranks right up there, when it comes to beauty, with a Ben Tubby penguin.

Monday, 12 February 2018

Fidelity / Melancholy Watch: The Downs (Keats leaves England, 1820) / Keats: "This living hand" (salvaged from the Deep Keats Scrolls) / Weston nearing the end... (Or Not)

4 comments: