Sunday, June 5, 2016
Saturday, June 4, 2016
Quotes / Emily Dickinson
QUOTES
by Emily Dickinson
Adversity
Boldness
Death and Dying
Because I could not stop for death, He kindly stopped for me; The carriage held but just ourselves and immortality.
Dissent
Assent -- and you are sane -- , demur -- you're straightway dangerous -- , and handled with a Chain -- .
Home
Joy
'Tis so much joy! 'Tis so much joy! If I should fail, what poverty! And yet, as poor as I Have ventured all upon a throw; Have gained! Yes! Hesitated so this side the victory!
Mind
Poetry and Poets
Present
Success
Words
A word is dead when it is said. Some say. I say it just, begins to live that day.
Tuesday, May 31, 2016
Friday, May 27, 2016
Finally Rich by Sam Riviere
FINALLY RICH
BY SAM RIVIERE
I got a job
I got a job writing poems
oh hi I never met you before
going to write you a poem
about your anniversary
your niece’s christening
your son’s wedding
your uncle’s funeral
you provided a helpful ‘factsheet’
full of personal details
your favourite songs and anecdotes
this is my material
the tone is ‘light’
the approach is up to me
you will pay £3 a line
you will pay £5 a line
you will pay £7 a line if rhymed
but hang on
wouldn’t a real poet want to get at ‘truth’
you paid for a real poet
how can I get ‘truth’ from this ‘factsheet’
the only way to ‘truth’
is saying ‘yo, I don’t know you’
and refusing to write the poem in the poem
then I doubt you’d pay me
here’s my question
do you want to buy a poem
because you know about poetry
or because you don’t know about poetry
think I need to see you
think I need to meet you
think I need to come and stay with you for like a week
perhaps the whole thing will get out of hand
if I get involved in some ‘heavy shit’
I’ll write a screenplay about it
of course I’ll change your name
the names of my dystopian employers
charlie kaufman some bigshot director
will buy the script executive produce
and I’ll be rich I won’t write any more poems
about your uncle’s wedding
your son’s christening
your niece’s funeral
your bill: £210
happy anniversary
ABOUT THE CONTRIBUTOR
SAM RIVIERE
began to write poetry while at the Norwich School of Art and Design, and completed a Masters at Royal Holloway. His poems have appeared in various publications and competitions since 2005. He co-edits the anthology series STOP SHARPENING YOUR KNIVES, and is currently working towards a PhD at the University of East Anglia. He was a recipient of a 2009 Eric Gregory Award. His first collection, 81 AUSTERITIES, was published by Faber in 2012.MAY 2012
Sunday, May 22, 2016
Neruda review - unconventional drama constructs rather than retells Chilean poet's life
Neruda review - unconventional drama constructs rather than retells Chilean poet's life
Pablo Larrain follows up No and The Club with an unlikely, often surreal and incredibly entertaining film that plays fast and loose with facts and time
Benjamin Lee
Saturday 14 May 2016 15.50 BST
The basic formula of the biopic has grown almost unbearably tiresome, thanks largely to the annual parade of mostly uninspiring Oscarbait true stories that serve to do nothing but show actors’ “range”. Would the world have stopped spinning if The Danish Girl or Trumbo had never been released?
As a response to the repetition, film-makers have been making more “constructed biopics”, taking elements, ideas and themes then mashing them together to make something less familiar. Born to be Blue, Joy and, most explicitly, I’m Not There have all been upfront about their fabricated narrative, the writers and directors all admitting that some creative license is required to make their subjects fit the medium.
Pablo Larrain is no stranger to this technique, employing Gael Garcia Bernal as a fictional ad man working during the Pinochet referendum in his Oscar-nominated 2012 drama No. He enlists Bernal again in this inventive and entertaining drama about the poet and senator Pablo Neruda and his time in exile in post-second world war Chile.
Bernal plays a detective on the hunt of Neruda, after he’s threatened with impeachment for accusing the government of abandoning communist ideals to appease the US. The two are locked in “a fabulous chase” that’s part myth and part fact, given that the pursuer doesn’t actually exist ...
Larrain’s film is a delicate balancing act and, along with screenwriter Guillermo Calderón, he avoids both smugness and a sense of artificiality with a playful tone and a sharp, meta take on the concept of character and story. Neruda, played by Luis Gnecco who bears a remarkable likeness to the poet, enjoys the thrill of the chase and sends the detective crime novels which then start to transform his character and cause him to question who is controlling his destiny.
It’s also refreshing to see a biopic that doesn’t deify its subject. Neruda is an influential idealist and a skilled poet, but he’s also an egotist and a snob. There’s a fascinating interaction when he’s approached by a fellow Communist who questions him on his growing status and how his persona is ultimately against the ideals of the party. Like the character himself, the film never stays still and is vibrant with ideas and energy.
Similarly, the detective on Neruda’s trail is anything but a cliche. He’s a man trying to figure out who his father is by examining his own actions and is torn between his artistic sensibilities and his more rigid profession. He’s also excited by the romance of the chase, questioning whether he’s the hero or the supporting character and the film leads the two characters to a surprisingly poignant finale.
Neruda takes a lot of wild chances and, like the poet whose life acts as inspiration, it’s unwilling to play by the rules. Dizzily constructed and full of more life and meaning than most “real” biopics, it’s a risk worth taking.
Wednesday, May 18, 2016
Walt Whitman / Happiness
HAPPINESS
By Walt Whitman
Happiness, not in another place but this place...not for another hour, but this hour.
Saturday, May 14, 2016
Pablo Neruda's importance was as much political as poetic
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| Pablo Neruda in Isla Negra |
Pablo Neruda's importance was as much political as poetic
On top of this week's exhumation, research is underlining why the newly-installed junta was so keen to be rid of him
Oscar Guardiola-Rivera
Wednesday 10 April 2013 10.42 BST
On 22 September 1973, Nobel laureate Pablo Neruda – whom Gabriel García Márquez dubbed "the greatest poet of the 20th century" – received some visitors at the Santa María hospital in Chile's capital Santiago. Among them were Sweden's ambassador Harald Edelstam and the Mexican ambassador Gonzalo Martínez Corbala, offering a plane to fly Neruda and his wife Matilde into exile.
We know about their conversation thanks to as yet unpublished documents at the National Archive in Sweden. Edelstam asserts he found the poet "very ill" though still willing to travel to Mexico. In a memo sent to his superiors, Edelstam observes: "In his last hours [Neruda] either didn't know or didn't recognise he suffered a terminal illness. He complained that rheumatism made it impossible to move his arms and legs. When we visited him, Neruda was preparing as best he could to travel … to Mexico. There, he would make a public declaration against the military regime."
That made the poet dangerous to some very powerful people, who had shown they would stop at nothing to defend their interests. They had ousted his friend, Salvador Allende, from the presidency less than a fortnight earlier. Allende died in a coup that was as much about silencing dissident voices as bringing about regime change. Another voice, that of popular singer Víctor Jara, was cut off four days later. Neruda remained. He was perhaps the loudest. His face certainly the most recognisable worldwide. He was too dangerous.
Members of the junta are on record expressing the view on the morning of September 22 that if Neruda flew into exile, his plane would fall into the sea. In the afternoon, radio stations under military control announced the poet would probably die in the next few hours, at a time when he was still awake in the hospital. The following day he was dead.
That historical mystery alone explains why his body was exhumed this week. But there are more pressing reasons too, at a time when the destiny of the left hangs in the balance in Latin America. The death of Venezuela's Hugo Chávez, one of many leftist leaders in the region to have fallen ill to cancer, has combined with the 700 documented assassination attempts against Cuba's Fidel Castro to fuel all manner of conspiracy theories.
More important still is the fact that, faced with an economic crisis without foreseeable end and few alternatives, a new generation of world activists needs to reconnect with the vibrant political imagination embodied by Neruda. The question is not merely whether the commitment he exemplified is possible now, but whether technology, and the institutions we use to manage it, can allow the kind of freedom Neruda called for in his poetry.
In this context, Neruda's life, as well as the shadows cast by his death, are Google-bombs waiting to be set off by a new generation of networked freedom fighters at the heart of our austerity-obsessed, repressive, and frankly boring narratives.
Neruda wasn't surprised by the 1973 coup – most people knew that the consequences of restoring "economic order" would be vicious, and many accepted it as necessary – but it wasn't inevitable: under a deal accepted by the government coalition as well as the opposition, President Allende was going to call for a referendum and would have resigned if the result went against him. This made any show of force by the smaller but influential sector within the Chilean armed forces unnecessary. But the conspirators were bent on regime change, so they brought forward the date of the coup, subjecting Chilean society to a trial by fire in order to cure it of a supposedly menacing communist "cancer".
The invocation of "cancer" to provide yesterday's rulers with a pretext to unleash war abroad and repression at home is mirrored by the questions being asked about Neruda's cancer today.
Neruda and the other individuals behind the Chilean revolution of the early 1970s made mistakes and were at least partially responsible for the consequences. But the real story behind their defeat and deaths hasn't been told yet. This is one of the reasons why people are looking to unearth new truths, hoping to shed some light on the origins of our problems today.
Through histories, testimonies, and documents declassified in the US or revealed as recently as last year by Wikileaks, we now know that the fate of Neruda and others like him had been decided long before they had any hand in mismanaging the economy or dividing political opinion. Persecution of the left had begun in Chile as early as 1948, at the behest of a US government awash with anti-communist paranoia.
That year, a controversial measure known as "the Damned Law" ("la ley maldita") outlawed the Chilean Communist Party, sent the communist leadership into exile and imprisoned hundreds of militants at the Pisagua camp under the orders of a young lieutenant named Augusto Pinochet – the concentration camp's director who would become Chile's dictator, and a friend and inspiration to Margaret Thatcher.
Neruda, radicalised like many others by the anti-fascist struggle of the 1930s and 40s, chose to flee the country. Fearing for his life he crossed the Andes on a horse, carrying with him the manuscript of his epic poem Canto General, before resurfacing in Mexico thanks to the help of his friends Pablo Picasso and Diego Rivera.
His second exile would have been in 1973. Edelstam's conversation with Neruda took place a mere two hours before the poet went to sleep, never to wake up again. When the Swedish diplomat went to Neruda's house to offer his condolences, he found it destroyed. Pinochet's men were bent on erasing every trace of his existence. They would do the same with thousands of people during a reign of terror that would last for nearly two decades. That is why so many people this week are holding their breath to find out what clues Neruda's exhumed body might hold.
• Oscar Guardiola-Rivera's Story of a Death Foretold: The Coup against Salvador Allende, 11 September 1973 will be published by Bloomsbury in September
Thursday, May 5, 2016
Pablo Neruda / A Passion for Life / Review by Rebecca Seal
Laureate of passion
Rebecca Seal on Pablo Neruda, a Passion for Life
Pablo Neruda, a Passion for Life
Adam Feinstein
Bloomsbury £9.99, pp422
Adam Feinstein
Bloomsbury £9.99, pp422
The Observer
Sunday 20 November 2005 01.43 GMT
There is no doubt that Pablo Neruda led an extraordinary life - poet, diplomat, Stalinist, communist, journalist, philanderer, husband and Nobel prize-winner.
Feinstein's book takes the reader on a whirlwind tour of that life, starting with his birth in 1904 into a somewhat itinerant Chilean family, made up of uncles who were in fact his half-brothers and sisters secretly born of his father's affairs. By the age of 16 he had left home for Santiago and his poems were already being published - even if some of them were, by his own admission, mawkish and adolescent.
The publication of Twenty Love Poems and a Song of Despair set the scene for the fame he was to have for the rest of his life, and allowed Neruda to start working as a diplomat (it was something of a Latin-American tradition to give poets a stipend based on diplomatic duties). In turn, this led Neruda towards communism and eventually Stalinism - something which resulted in him having to go into hiding and then exile, after the Chilean government declared him an outlaw. At the same time he managed to continue his political agitation, marry three times, travel widely and publish prolifically, eventually winning the Noble Prize for Literature in 1971.
This book is a loving portrait of a very unusual man. Feinstein has reverently pieced together information from memoirs, articles and interviews to create this biography, one of only very few written about Neruda. Unfortunately, that can make it read like a text book or scholarly work, and at times Feinstein slips into listing facts and events with little in the way of narrative or reflection.
None the less, this remains a fascinating insight into the life of one of the most important poets of the 20th century.
Monday, April 18, 2016
Robert Bly / Waiting for night to come
Waiting for night to come
I.
How much I long for the night to come
Again — I am restless all afternoon —
And the huge stars to appear
All over the heavens!… The black spaces between stars…
And the blue to fade away.
How much I long for the night to come
Again — I am restless all afternoon —
And the huge stars to appear
All over the heavens!… The black spaces between stars…
And the blue to fade away.
II.
I worked on poems with my back to the window,
Waiting for the darkness that I remember
Noticing from my cradle.
When I step over and open the door, I am
A salmon slipping over the gravel into the ocean.
I worked on poems with my back to the window,
Waiting for the darkness that I remember
Noticing from my cradle.
When I step over and open the door, I am
A salmon slipping over the gravel into the ocean.
III.
One star stands alone in the western darkness:
Arcturus. Caught in their love, the Arabs called it
The Keeper of Heaven. I think
It was in the womb that I received
The thirst for the dark heavens.
One star stands alone in the western darkness:
Arcturus. Caught in their love, the Arabs called it
The Keeper of Heaven. I think
It was in the womb that I received
The thirst for the dark heavens.
Tuesday, April 12, 2016
Robert Bly / When my dead father called
When my dead father called
by Robert Bly
Last night I dreamt my father called to us.
He was stuck somewhere. It took us
A long time to dress, I don’t know why.
The night was snowy; there were long black roads.
He was stuck somewhere. It took us
A long time to dress, I don’t know why.
The night was snowy; there were long black roads.
Finally, we reached the little town, Bellingham.
There he stood, by a streetlamp in cold wind,
Snow blowing along the sidewalk. I noticed
The uneven sort of shoes that men wore
There he stood, by a streetlamp in cold wind,
Snow blowing along the sidewalk. I noticed
The uneven sort of shoes that men wore
In the early Forties. And overalls. He was smoking.
Why did it take us so long to get going? Perhaps
He left us somewhere once, or did I simply
Forget he was alone in winter in some town?
Why did it take us so long to get going? Perhaps
He left us somewhere once, or did I simply
Forget he was alone in winter in some town?
Sunday, April 10, 2016
Pablo Neruda / A Passion for Life / Review by Andrew Motion
And where are the lilacs?
Adam Feinstein neatly combines the music of Pablo Neruda's poetry and the whirl of his life
Pablo Neruda: A Passion for Life
by Adam Feinstein
497pp, Bloomsbury, £25
Saturday 31 July 2004 01.05 BST
Pablo Neruda couldn't hold a tune. "My ear," he admitted, "could never recognise any but the most obvious melodies, and even then, only with difficulty." His friends agreed with him. "The only thing he didn't have an ear for was music," said Aida Figueroa. "He couldn't understand music. He could hear the sound of birds, people's words. But not music."
This is remarkable: the artfulness and range of Neruda's cadences are crucial to the power of his writing. In early work such as Crepusculario (1923) and the best-selling Veinte poemas (1924) he has the mingled richness and discipline of a string quartet. In more political mid-century work he blows and drums with impressive vehemence. In later, more personal and/or metaphysical writing such as Memorial de Isla Negra (1964), he is a virtuoso solo instrumentalist. No one reading his poems in their original Spanish would want to separate their sense from their sound. Even when translated into English, their meaning is inseparable from their melody.
Adam Feinstein's new biography, published to coincide with the centenary of Neruda's birth, is fuelled by an infectious enthusiasm for the poems: this is its greatest strength. But it also has an admirable patience with the dizzying detail of his life. It's difficult to think of a 20th-century poet who did more than Neruda. He wrote a huge number of books, he travelled like a man possessed, he whirled himself round in the life of his times, he loved and lost a large number of women, he collected a small army of famous friends. Some of these things are grist to the biographer's mill: Feinstein's account is crammed with adventure stories, narrow scrapes, passionate encounters. Others are harder to deal with: globe-trottings which have to be logged but risk becoming a list of place-names. By pacing the story so as to give pre-eminence to the writing and the adventuring, while recording the duller passages more briefly, Feinstein creates his own sympathetic music. His book turns Neruda's life into an opera - a blend of aria and recitative.
Sensibly, he relies a good deal on Neruda's own Memoirs (now reissued along with a bilingual edition of Isla Negra by the Souvenir Press). These are packed with marvellous details that give colour to the story, as well as providing a way of understanding how Neruda's fascination with real things, in real places, gives a shape to even his most vatic poems. At a parting with a grief-stricken girlfriend, for instance: "She kissed my arms, my suit, in a kind of ritual, and suddenly slipped down to my shoes, before I could stop her. When she stood up again, the chalk polish of my white shoes was smeared like flour all over her face."
Feinstein is too thorough to accept the Memoirs at face value, wonderful as they are. He understands that an author's reminiscences are a way of creating disguises as well as revealing secrets, and regularly checks them against the available evidence, amplifying the many complicated or contentious issues hushed up by Neruda himself. In fact he is alive, from the first, to the sense that Neruda grew up among secrets, and was therefore likely to enjoy them later. He had a half-brother and half-sister only reluctantly acknowledged by his family, his father was a disciplinarian whose severities provoked subterfuge, and his mother - who died shortly after his birth - later became a means of addressing illicit loves under the shelter of her name.
Neruda's own original name was Neftali, which he retained until the age of 16, then jettisoned as a sign that he had become his own man. Leaving his home-town of Temuco, and joining the relatively cosmopolitan world of Santiago, his interests rapidly expanded to accommodate social as well as family matters; also to create a more suggestive style.
Picking his way through the labyrinth of publishers and magazines, he relied heavily on French symbolist poetry to stretch his imagination, combining surrealist touches and impressionistic overviews with his original fidelity to facts. The result was a fusion never previously known in Chilean poetry - rarely seen in poetry anywhere - and his success was meteoric. Veinte poemas sold in enormous quantities; he was the toast of the town.
But it wasn't a town, or a country, where he wanted to stay put: his exploded imagination needed a larger canvas, and the cultural and economic condition of Chile both compelled and exasperated him. He chose various kinds of consular activity as the means of escape. By 1927 he was in Rangoon, then moved on through France, Japan, China, Ceylon and Java (where he met his first wife, Maria), before returning home in 1932. By this time his Spanish was apparently "quite odd... very much influenced by his solitude", and his sense of himself much altered: "He was no longer the sombre, melancholic, absent young man. Now he talked a lot, laughed for the strangest reasons." But these were not changes which threatened his audience: they added authority to his originality.
They didn't, however, do much for his political conscience. This only began to develop in the early 1930s, when he was posted to Spain, fell in love with Delia del Carril and made friends with Lorca. Delia persuaded him to become a communist - a process which meant that he inflicted a great deal of pain on his first wife and their sickly daughter, while producing poems that exalted the suffering masses. It confronts Feinstein with the classic biographer's dilemma - how to respect the work while dealing with a contradictory private life - and he copes with it well, by presenting the facts rather than wagging his finger, and by foregrounding the writing. As the background scenery changes from France to Chile again, we see Neruda the romantic lyricist turning into Neruda the "truth-teller and exposer of the world's injustices: 'You will ask: And where are the lilacs / And the metaphysics petalled with poppies / And the rain repeatedly spattering / Its words, filling them with holes and birds? ... Come and see the blood in the streets. / Come and see / The blood in the streets. / Come and see the blood / In the streets!"
Supported by Delia, feted by his home-crowd, increasingly famous on the world stage, Neruda spent the late 30s and early 40s travelling round South America, converting his experience of other people's suffering into poems, standing as a senator, and defending the new emphasis of his work: "I have a profound sense that I am fulfilling a duty. I was a nocturnal writer who spent part of his existence clinging to the walls on empty nights. Now I am happy. We must walk down the middle of the street, meeting life head on."
Given the political climate, it was bound to end in trouble - or rather, given Neruda's personal climate, in trouble and adventure. In 1949 he made a daring escape from Chile over the Andes into Buenos Aires, then through the early 50s set off on his travels again, speaking for the oppressed everywhere while courting the likes of Picasso and Hikmet, and neglecting Delia in favour of Matilde, who eventually became his third wife.
These paradoxes bring their own difficulties - but their tensions are massively increased by fault-lines in Neruda's politics. Even after Khrushchev had condemned Stalin's crimes at the party congress in 1956, Neruda still hesitated to speak out against him - as he also refused to condemn the Soviet invasion of Prague. What was the problem? Incomprehension? Naivety? Stubbornness? Neruda himself simply (too simply) made a distinction "between two periods in the life of Stalin and his policies: the one which 'embodied the direction of the day / when he asked opinions of the light' and the one in which Stalin usurped absolute power".
Feinstein lets his readers draw their own conclusions about the moral muddle of Neruda's life, shining the same clear light on his politics that he turns on his private life (even Matilde was betrayed, when Neruda had a late fling with her niece). This is as well. The faults and weaknesses are plain to see - but so is the undimmed exuberance and generosity of the work, which feeds hungrily off the life and yet stands as a thing apart. So too is the suffering, with which the book ends. After a triumphant association with Allende, Neruda died in the early days of the Pinochet era, his house in Santiago wrecked, and his funeral wake held amid the ruins. No one could read these pages without feeling a sharp sympathy. Everything that was vain, silly, greedy and blind about Neruda weighs less than the humanity of his work, and the essential nobility of his spirit.
· Andrew Motion is poet laureate.
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