COMPLEYNTS AND ACCOMMODATIONS

A Compleynt

An adjective separated from its noun

For no good reason. There seems to be

Suddenly in the 21st century acres of awful

Line-breaks, and it is not pleasant.

In fact one becomes heartily weary of reading

And having to piece together portions

Of linguini which have been cooked separately

Then served on adjacent plates. Surely

It should not be, yet it seems undeniably

The case that from, say, twenty to thirty

‘award-winning poets’ ranged along the shelves

Not one avoids being tedious in the extreme.

Three Bunting Tangles

Because of the timing

Of his divorce from his first wife

Who was pregnant at the time

He never saw his son

Who died of tuberculosis.

Dismissed from government office

On marrying his second wife

Who was considered under-age,

He would be subject still to bureaucracies

Such as imprisoned him as conscientious objector.

And at the end of Briggflats

There is a peculiar puzzle, not annotated:

The perplex is in the sixth-last line.

How can this syntax be resolved?

The line is, ‘Where are we who knows?’

Revaluation

‘Frankly, Dickens is no good at all.’

(F. R. Leavis rolls out his grey pall.)

But then soon, over wine

Queenie begs to decline,

And, quite suddenly, Dickens stands tall.

Two North Country Haiku

At Hartburn tea shop

I had a second date scone,

Then wished I hadn’t.

At Uppsettlington,

Bad still, looking forward to

Reaching Shittlehope.

A Bizarre Game

A free-versification of a charming letter

In the Blue Mountains Gazette. Katoomba Falls

Was the venue for a bizarre game of cricket

Between Katoomba and Faulconbridge Oaks.

Katoomba won the toss and elected to bat.

Opening bowler for the Oaks, Sam Connolley

Took a wicket with his first ball and another two

During the over to end the first over

At 3 for 1. His bowling partner, Adam Cavill

Also took a wicket with his first ball

And another with his last, to end his first over

At 2 for 0. Katoomba was 5 for 1

After two overs. The batting collapse continued

And after four overs Katoomba were struggling

At 7 wickets down for 2 runs, both of these

Being no-balls. Katoomba’s innings ended

In the 12th over, being all out

For 20, which was something of a comeback.

At one stage they were 9 for 6;

Their total of 20 included 8 ducks.

Faulconbridge came out to bat. Adam Cavill,

Normally a middle-order batsman scored 22

From the first over to win the match

By 10 wickets in 6 balls.

Katoomba could well have benefited

From the help of the fox-terrier dog

Who, urged to fetch it, steals the ball

In the Australian classic, How McDougal Topped the Score.

Something Somewhat Like a Birthday Poem:

If a leaf grows on a birch tree, it has to be a birch leaf

– Geirr Tveitt

To Teja who is not convinced

By poetry.

(I mean, really! Look at that!

The line breaks are

so arbitrary!)

Teja who has serious doubts

Concerning poetry (although she does not

Always voice these doubts

at home over wine.)

Teja who is unconvinced

By cutting prose up into little bits.

To Teja who prefers, to poetry,

An open field with gambolling sheep,

Since poetry seems at best a gamble.

Teja doubts

And shares her doubts

With many who,

On taking some slim volume from the shelf,

Leaf backwards back to some obscurity

And soon return it to the shelf.

To Teja who is not persuaded by poetry

And so aligns herself with one

Who lived and wrote in Trieste

A mythic stone’s throw from Slovenia.

This was

Chain-smoking Italo Svevo (writer of prose)

Who teased his friend Montale,

saying,

Poetry is not good value – since

There’s too much empty page

And not enough words to represent

Value for money.

The blank page feels

as if a seagull

Has stolen Meaning out of our hand.

Like Svevo, Teja sees in that empty field

Only rudimentary sticks and stones;

The empty page appears to her

As if she had stepped out from the house

Into a brilliant sun

To call the sheep,

And all four of them

Were hiding behind the shed.

Despite her questioning view of poetry

Teja’s legion of admirers still persist

And attempt their paeans in praise of her.

The sheep perhaps encourage it.

They see no harm in it – as long

As studio doors are opened if they knock.

And so we reach the point

In Teja’s Birthday Poem (First Draft)

At which the sheep appear beside the rose –

The Cecile Brunner twining round its stump.

They say:

‘A word in your shell-like ear.

Remember. Show not Tell.

That’s what we do.

And that’s what she likes best.’

This stops us in our tracks.

We had been just about to list

Her many qualities – but,

Instead,

Find ourselves listing in the field,

Off-balance in the autumn sun.

And now the sheep are looking wise

And certainly know more

Than we do with our feeble similes

As we debate

Whether who or whom

Or less instead of fewer,

Or whether to say owing to

And not due to –

And much more in our troubling armoury.

Now looking wise under the trees

The sheep are calm

Not giving anything away.

The sheep are calm, not giving anything away;

They clearly think

All these line-breaks are a waste of field

Not running freely as they like to do.

And yet they nudge us saying: ‘Look!

So far you haven’t told or shown a thing!

Perhaps we’ll have to help.

‘How about You can take

The girl out of Slovenia but

You can’t…You know the rest.’

And that is all.

So, suddenly,

Here is Teja’s Birthday Poem (Final Draft.)

It is wordless,

luminous,

and consists

Of a grassed field with path and trees.

Teja is in the field

And all four sheep are following her.

And that is all.

From a Reliable Source

Since all the actors have now quit the stage,

This hear-say, not perhaps quite her-say, is

after shadowy years no longer heresy,

But may be told and tolled as here-to-stay.

At A & R’s, a book launch. Up the stair

Leonie Kramer furls her wet umbrella,

And in the velvet smoke of cigarettes

Announces breathlessly that she has just

Felt lightning travel up and down its shaft.

A number of her audience think at once:

Ah! What an emblem of her amorous nights
Which have excess of electricity.

Appropriately behind her on the stair

Is Alec Hope (at that time in the glare

Of L. K.’s husband’s Sam Spade agency.)

This young upstanding Alec strikes a pose --

Which many in the room find strangely odd –

For Alec has split his trousers on the stair.

To all who note this two-fold circumstance,

Books waiting to be launched seem all at sea

While Allegory runs rampant through the room.

Geirr Tveitt (1908 – 1981)

We are speaking of the far north of Norway

Where Brødnabrakane sails slowly on its glacier.

At school the bor Tveitt’s compositions

Are consistently ridiculed by his teacher;

He copies out a piece by Grieg and includes it,

And is gratified when the teacher ridicules it also.

Years later on spanish radio he is performing

A concert of pino pieces by Grieg. His mind

Is suddenly blank. He cannot remember as note.

Instead he improvises a piece by ‘Grieg.’ No-one notices.

At Folgafodne glacier and high Hardangervidda

On Christmas Eve, the animals speak;

The song in the waterfall writes itself

In white notes on the face of the plume.

At Brødnabrakane there is no electricity,

No road and no running water. His piano

Has to be hauled up to the new house

By horse sled over hard silent snow.

This is the house which will in 1962-63

Be crushed by a record-eclipsing snowfall,

The house disappearing under its white burial,

Even while the Aurora Borealis commissions

A new piano concerto of the same name.

In 1970 a second house is burnt to the ground

So that four-fifths of his musical output

Will be permanently lost. Decline follows.

It is as if a curtain has been drawn

and a window closed on the Northern Lights.

In May, 1954, in a last Paris triumph, tveitt played

The First Concertos of Tchaikovsky and Brahms

Followed by his own Fifth Concerto

In a performance diverging from its published form.

It was, as one admirer noted, ‘as if a glacier

Accelerated, causing the Hardangervidda Floes.’

Vacancies

We are standing seated in the siding

As our train waits for the Trans-Siberian

Inverness Overnight Orient Express to pass

While curiously, all at sea, we see

Framed in a window the face

Of someone we knew long ago

Clearly trying to signal to us that he –

Or she – has recently died. The things you see

In a siding in the middle of nowhere!

Even stranger is this. Our train

Is not moving on. Instead, we step down

Into the warm breeze the Express has left,

And are surprised that the solitary parcel

Left on the platform is addressed to us.

There is a message: ‘By the time you read this

We will be steaming into Vladivostok

And straddling tectonic plates which will part

As Bobby Fischer checkmates Boris Spasky.’

Could this greeting be in code? Wrapped in it

Is a modest plaque engraved with the legend,

‘On this site in 1908 nothing happened.’

Two Trains

One train was setting out for the coast

With a hailspot muslin volute following.

Her train was white organza blowing like steam

And non-stopping as far as the mountains.

Rivetting

Sir Joshua Reynolds told James Boswell this.

That coming back from Italy he met

With Samuel Johnson’s Life of Mr Savage

And began to read it standing in the room

With his arm leaning against the chimney piece.

It seized and held his mind so forcibly

That, not being able to put the book down

Until the final page, he then attempted

To move, and found his arm ‘totally benumbed.’

still (in autumn sunlight which he loved)

Respecting his originality:

Nothing more precious than to be alone

Except to have companions at one’s side

To whom one can confide this sentiment –

Nothing more precious than to be alone.

o

Dark wings had folded round his head
And so he shared the Unwins’ home.

When Mr Unwin fell from his horse

And Mary Unwin became a Muse,

She and Cowper moved to Olney.

Still Mrs Unwin for twenty years,

She walked its fields on William’s arm

And conjured flowers to deck The Task.

o

To Lady Hesketh (Harriet Cowper)

‘...The sun glimmering through the elms

opposite the window falls on my desk

With all the softness of moonshine...’

The sun glimmers through the elms

and falling on my mirroring desk

Might seem reflected from the moon.

Light travelling directly from the sun

Seems at my window to have been

Diverted to the floating moon.

A Sequence of Discoveries

One day under irrelevant clouds

And oblivious beams of sunlight, Vollard

– That is, Ambroise Vollard, the Art Dealer –

Is browsing amongst the second-hand books

In trays a book’s throw from the Seine.

He says to himself, Ambroise Vollard, Editeur

Would, certainement, look splendid on the title page.

But what to publish? One needs an author.

And, later, in a separate serendipity,

He sees a particular font, The Garard typeface

Designed for Francis I, no less, which he feels

Would be le font juste for poetry.

Next, he overhears on a crowded bus

A conversation in which someone says

That Verlaine and Mallarmé are the two names

To watch amongst contemporary poets.

Putting deux et deux together, Vollard visits

A bookshop and at no cost leafs through both of these.

Verlaine he finds exactly his tasse de thé

While Mallarmé unfortunately seems not

Les pantaloons des fourmis. Therefore he decides

To publish a handsome book by Verlaine.

But wait! Who should provide sumptuous pictures?

This is at once solved by the thought, Bonnard!

So in the course of several days he has enlisted

The Seine and browsing and a typeface and a bus

And a bookshop and the name Bonnard:

He has Une homme! Un projet! Panama!

The text would be Parallelement by Verlaine

With 109 versions (and visions) of Bonnard’s Marthe.

On requesting official permission to reprint the text

He is puzzled by the response that it seems odd

To publish a book on Geometry in verse.

But only after the print run is complete

Do the authorities intervene and object

Particularly at the cover’s rose-pink ingenue.

They demand the confiscation of all copies

But Bonnard saves the day by changing the cover.

Nevertheless Vollard regrets that this succès de scandale

Does not increase sales by a single tittle or jot

When the books, replacing his Renoirs,

Languish in his gallery window.

A Complaint Misdiagnosed

The specialist doctor frowned

As he scribbled on a note pad

Then passed the sheet of paper

Saying, ‘Do you know what that is?’

He had written the word ‘Agrophobia’ (sic).

I said ‘No. actually
I have never heard of it.’

But, producing a pen, I wrote

On the other side of the sheet,

‘Agoraphobia’ and passed it back, saying

‘But I do know what that is

And I haven’t got it.’

A Poet Speculates

Surpassing wonders, let us postulate

This supposition touching Wyatt’s death

Which Alice Oswald ventures to relate

May splendidly have found another path.

Officially, in 1542

He rode too fast to Falmouth, caught a chill

And died in Dorset, strangely buried there

In another family’s tomb. But, if a will,

There must be ways. Suppose that, as he wrote

‘In hidden places so let my days forth pass’

He did not die but, two years banished, met

Again Elizabeth Darrell, in whose face

And body was that longed-for hynde in thought,

With whom to escape the dangers of the court.

Interchange

In the central domed plaza

Of the railway interchange

Where travellers return from one journey

To set out on another

Like ants benignly bumping into each other

Before resuming in a different direction,

A man wears his shirt. Travellers read

The rotation of the earth

Always makes my day.

Not only does one admire

The charming adverb here, but the dome

Seems like the sun with its dependent worlds.

Marine Archaeology

In 1959 Billy Wilder

Filming The Private Life of Sherlock Holmes

Asked for a 30 foot Loch Ness Monster.

The result was a creature with long neck

And two humps. Wilder rejected the humps

Despite technical advice that without them

Buoyancy might be seriously affected.

He insisted. The monster sank without trace

As Doctor Watson watched on in moonlight.

In 2020 a scientific expedition

Searching for evidence of the actual monster

Dredged and raised the humpless artefact.

A Pretentious Letter

First, I should mention the sun

Which was a bit carried away

And poured itself disproportionately

Into the grove I was crossing.

There I happened to hear

What turned out surprisingly

To be Elgar’s Dream Children

But which I strangely thought

Was Knoxville by Samuel Barber.

And since you are, I think,

The one person who would know

The wistful harmonies of both works,

You will understand this pleasing uncertainty.

And during this performance, the sun

Came to its senses and balance was restored.

Verandah

Glazed side verandah full sun;

The Oxford Book of English Prose shelved

Uppermost and slightly sun-warped,

Offers itself as a field for ploughing,

These lineation furrows signs of respect.

Verandah sunlight lies around us

Like Heaven in our infancy. And events

Pressing at the cobwebbed windows

Declare the need for Les Murray syntax

Like pushing a bookcase up stairs.

And here at my feet a TLS

Yellowed from months of sunlight

Which I think contains a letter

Here paraphrased. ‘Sir,

Of the sixty-five texts

Purporting to be poems you have published,

Since I took out my subscription,

Only three are poems. Yrs., etc.’

Late Montale

In his late period flowering

As in the late period of every Beethoven,

Montale settles on tautologies

Which he makes banal and profound

And which are equivalent to saying,

After all things have been considered,

The Past is past.

And like every late periodist

He will labour to define

In what way and to what extent

And with what unique particularities

The Past is past,

Implying that it has only just become so

Or may even be still in perilous transit.

And like a pulsar still collapsing

With its hydrogen flowing and flowering

In a cadenza of fusion,

He makes every tautology

Seem loaded with content

Still disclosing undiscovered lodes

And with thresholds still to be crossed.

In his youth Montale became

Memorialised by cuttlefish bones

And the lizard’s heat on the Ligurian coast.

But in his late period

He records in a fragment his indifference

Bordering on resentment

At the persistence of this past.

Like shivering viewers of the test pattern

On the new-fangled marvel, tele-vision

In a store window in the Fifties,

i.e. the Past –

He would wish those cuttlefish middens

To change, or at least

Be relegated to an unread footnote.

In this late period

He lists fragments connected with nothing more

Than their joint presence in the past:

Skyscrapers, anteaters, influenza, fevers,

An alarm clock with nightingale trill,

A brass band on the sea front;

And to these fragments he adds

The suggestion that, were memory

To be detached from us

It might survive alone –

So great is his impulse

To urge, Only disconnect

As an affirmation of quintessence.

To this end he eschews rhyme

And embarks on a deliberate policy

Of unequal phrase lengths

And an avoidance of anything resembling

The regular waves reaching the shore

Beside ordered fields with villas

And palaces and towers representing

The lyrical successes of previous centuries.