Contagion -- Spike Milligan

Guest poems submitted by James Gilbey:
The hugely talented Spike Milligan - comedian, writer, novelist, poet,
humanist - died in February. I've been waiting for a tribute on the web site
but none has been forthcoming. Taking matters into my own paws, I submit the
following:

(Poem #1044) Contagion Elephants are contagious! Be careful how you tread. An Elephant that's been trodden on Should be confined to bed! Leopards are contagious too. Be careful tiny tots. They don't give you a temperature But lots and lots - of spots. The Herring is a lucky fish From all disease inured. Should he be ill when caught at sea; Immediately - he's cured! -- Spike Milligan

Thousands of kids that grew up between the 50s and 70s will share memories
of being read bedtime stories from Spike's Silly Verse for Kids. This is one
my dad would read to me and leave pauses at the end of each verse for me to
fill in the words.

Yet Spike is best known for the Goon Show. Dubbed the grandfather of
Alternative Comedy, not a single Python would contest that what they did
couldn't have happened without the foundations that Spike and Co. lay.

Born in Ahmednagar in India in 1918, he received his first education in a
tent in the Hyberabad Sindh desert and graduated there through a series of
Roman Catholic schools in England and India to the Lewisham Polytechnic. He
began his career as a bandmember but has made his name through comedy and
writing.

He is famously quoted as asking that on his tombstone the following be
inscribed: "See, I told you I was ill". I do hope it was. RIP Spike, we'll
miss you.

James.

The Steeple-Jack -- Marianne Moore

(Poem #1043) The Steeple-Jack Dürer would have seen a reason for living in a town like this, with eight stranded whales to look at; with the sweet sea air coming into your house on a fine day, from water etched with waves as formal as the scales on a fish. One by one in two's and three's, the seagulls keep flying back and forth over the town clock, or sailing around the lighthouse without moving their wings -- rising steadily with a slight quiver of the body -- or flock mewing where a sea the purple of the peacock's neck is paled to greenish azure as Dürer changed the pine green of the Tyrol to peacock blue and guinea gray. You can see a twenty-five- pound lobster; and fish nets arranged to dry. The whirlwind fife-and-drum of the storm bends the salt marsh grass, disturbs stars in the sky and the star on the steeple; it is a privilege to see so much confusion. Disguised by what might seem the opposite, the sea- side flowers and trees are favored by the fog so that you have the tropics first hand: the trumpet-vine, fox-glove, giant snap-dragon, a salpiglossis that has spots and stripes; morning-glories, gourds, or moon-vines trained on fishing-twine at the back door; cat-tails, flags, blueberries and spiderwort, striped grass, lichens, sunflowers, asters, daisies -- yellow and crab-claw ragged sailors with green bracts -- toad-plant, petunias, ferns; pink lilies, blue ones, tigers; poppies; black sweet-peas. The climate is not right for the banyan, frangipani, or jack-fruit trees; or for exotic serpent life. Ring lizard and snake-skin for the foot, if you see fit; but here they've cats, not cobras, to keep down the rats. The diffident little newt with white pin-dots on black horizontal spaced- out bands lives here; yet there is nothing that ambition can buy or take away. The college student named Ambrose sits on the hillside with his not-native books and hat and sees boats at sea progress white and rigid as if in a groove. Liking an elegance of which the sourch is not bravado, he knows by heart the antique sugar-bowl shaped summer-house of interlacing slats, and the pitch of the church spire, not true, from which a man in scarlet lets down a rope as a spider spins a thread; he might be part of a novel, but on the sidewalk a sign says C. J. Poole, Steeple Jack, in black and white; and one in red and white says Danger. The church portico has four fluted columns, each a single piece of stone, made modester by white-wash. Theis would be a fit haven for waifs, children, animals, prisoners, and presidents who have repaid sin-driven senators by not thinking about them. The place has a school-house, a post-office in a store, fish-houses, hen-houses, a three-masted schooner on the stocks. The hero, the student, the steeple-jack, each in his way, is at home. It could not be dangerous to be living in a town like this, of simple people, who have a steeple-jack placing danger signs by the church while he is gilding the solid- pointed star, which on a steeple stands for hope. -- Marianne Moore

Archibald MacLeish famously wrote:
   "A poem should not mean
    But be."
I can think of no poet who so consistently fulfils MacLeish's dictum as
Marianne Moore.

Randall Jarrell talks of "her lack -- her wonderful lack -- of arbitrary
intensity or violence, of sweep and overwhelmingness and size, of cant, of
sociological significance". Her poems simply exist; they "cannot be suborned
to any end but their own" [1]. They are elegant and precise; carefully
constructed and meticulously detailed; and always, always, wonderfully
rewarding.

thomas.

[1] Michael Schmidt, in his magisterial study "Lives of the Poets". Schmidt
goes on to say this about Moore's verse: "Her syllabics are straightforward.
Instead of the verse being 'free' or governed by metre or regular stress
patterns, she chooses to build a stanza in which the lines have a
predetermined number of syllables. Indentation underlines the parallels. The
shape of the stanza indicates the syllabic disposition. With the addition of
rhyme, this is one of the most restrictive measures a poet can deploy."

[Biography]

Born near St. Louis, Missouri, on November 15, 1887, Marianne Moore was
raised in the home of her grandfather, a Presbyterian pastor. After her
grandfather's death, in 1894, Moore and her family stayed with other
relatives, and in 1896 they moved to Carlisle, Pennsylvania. She attended
Bryn Mawr College and received her B.A. in 1909. Following graduation, Moore
studied typing at Carlisle Commercial College, and from 1911 to 1915 she was
employed as a school teacher at the Carlisle Indian School. In 1918, Moore
and her mother moved to New York City, and in 1921, she became an assistant
at the New York Public Library. She began to meet other poets, such as
William Carlos Williams and Wallace Stevens, and to contribute to the Dial,
a prestigious literary magazine. She served as acting editor of the Dial
from 1925 to 1929. Along with the work of such other members of the Imagist
movement as Ezra Pound, Williams, and H. D., Moore's poems were published in
the Egoist, an English magazine, beginning in 1915. In 1921, H.D. published
Moore's first book, Poems, without her knowledge.

Moore was widely recognized for her work; among her many honors were the
Bollingen prize, the National Book Award, and the Pulitzer Prize. She wrote
with the freedom characteristic of the other modernist poets, often
incorporating quotes from other sources into the text, yet her use of
language was always extraordinarily condensed and precise, capable of
suggesting a variety of ideas and associations within a single, compact
image. In his 1925 essay "Marianne Moore," William Carlos Williams wrote
about Moore's signature mode, the vastness of the particular: "So that in
looking at some apparently small object, one feels the swirl of great
events." She was particularly fond of animals, and much of her imagery is
drawn from the natural world. She was also a great fan of professional
baseball and an admirer of Muhammed Ali, for whom she wrote the liner notes
to his record, I Am the Greatest! Deeply attached to her mother, she lived
with her until Mrs. Moore's death in 1947. Marianne Moore died in New York
City in 1972.

        -- www.poets.org

[Moreover]

Here's an extract from a review (by Frank Kermode) of Moore's "Selected
Letters", in which he talks about her poetic method:

"Moore once remarked that 'prose is a step beyond poetry ... and then there
is another poetry that is a step beyond that': you had to go through prose
to come out the other side purged of that disposable prior poetry, with its
irrelevant inversions and its subjection to conventional rhythms. The
posterior poetry would have built into it the virtues of good prose. In the
syllabic poems, where 'each stanza' is 'a duplicate of every other stanza'
(much as Donne set himself argumentative problems by exactly replicating an
arbitrarily complicated opening stanza), the sentences could, indeed must,
be capable of being written straight out as prose; what is lost in the
process of doing that is precisely the machine-like precision of the
repetitions of line length and covert rhyme. If the effect seems mechanical,
so be it. In 1932, on the brink of celebrity, she remarked that 'a thing so
mechanically perfect as a battleship is always a pleasure to me.'

One can see something of what this means by looking at 'The Steeple-Jack',
the poem which, though not an early work, having been published in 1932,
stands first in both the Collected Poems of 1981 and the Selected Poems of
1941. It was much admired by both Eliot, who arranged the order of the poems
for Moore, putting this one at the head, and by Wallace Stevens, who
analysed it at some length, commending, among other things, the poet's
attachment to truth. The opening six-line stanza sets the arbitrary pattern
of line length and rhyme, and has a full close:

 Dürer would have seen a reason for living
   in a town like this, with eight stranded whales
 to look at, with the sweet sea air coming into your house
 on a fine day, from water etched
   with waves as formal as the scales
 on a fish

(Dürer because he travelled far and fruitlessly to inspect a beached whale,
but also because of the etched scales; and, more generally, because he is
deeply in the thought of the poem.) The second and third stanzas repeat the
stanza pattern but form a continuous sentence which flows over the scheme
without disturbing it, stopping at the last line of the third stanza. The
fourth stanza strictly observes the pattern and the rhymes, one of which,
'the' and 'sea-', is virtually not there."

        -- [broken link] http://www.lrb.co.uk/v20n08/kerm2008.htm

The Schooner 'Flight' -- Derek Walcott

(Poem #1041) The Schooner 'Flight' 1. Adios, Carenage In idle August, while the sea soft, and leaves of brown islands stick to the rim of this Caribbean, I blow out the light by the dreamless face of Maria Concepcion to ship as a seaman on the schooner Flight. Out in the yard turning grey in the dawn, I stood like a stone and nothing else move but the cold sea rippling like galvanize and the nail holes of stars in the sky roof, till a wind start to interfere with the trees. I pass me dry neighbour sweeping she yard as I went downhill, and I nearly said: "Sweep soft, you witch, 'cause she don't sleep hard", but the bitch look through me like I was dead. A route taxi pull up, park-lights still on. The driver size up my bags with a grin: "This time, Shabine, like you really gone!" I ain't answer the ass, I simply pile in the back seat and watch the sky burn above Laventille pink as the gown in which the woman I left was sleeping, and I look in the rearview and see a man exactly like me, and the man was weeping for the houses, the streets, that whole fucking island. Christ have mercy on all sleeping things! From that dog rotting down Wrightson Road to when I was a dog on these streets; if loving these islands must be my load, out of corruption my soul takes wings, But they had started to poison my soul with their big house, big car, big-time bohbohl, coolie, nigger, Syrian, and French Creole, so I leave it for them and their carnival -- I taking a sea-bath, I gone down the road. I know these islands from Monos to Nassau, a rusty head sailor with sea-green eyes that they nickname Shabine, the patois for any red nigger, and I, Shabine, saw when these slums of empire was paradise. I'm just a red nigger who love the sea, I had a sound colonial education, I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me, and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation. But Maria Concepcion was all my thought watching the sea heaving up and down as the port side of dories, schooners, and yachts was painted afresh by the strokes of the sun signing her name with every reflection; I know when dark-haired evening put on her bright silk at sunset, and, folding the sea, sidled under the sheet with her starry laugh, that there'd be no rest, there'd be no forgetting. Is like telling mourners round the graveside about resurrection, they want the dead back, so I smile to myself as the bow rope untied and the Flight swing seaward: "Is no use repeating that the sea have more fish. I ain't want her dressed in the sexless light of a seraph, I want those round brown eyes like a marmoset, and till the day when I can lean back and laugh, those claws that tickled my back on sweating Sunday afternoons, like a crab on wet sand." As I worked, watching the rotting waves come past the bow that scissor the sea like silk, I swear to you all, by my mother's milk, by the stars that shall fly from tonight's furnace, that I loved them, my children, my wife, my home; I loved them as poets love the poetry that kills them, as drowned sailors the sea. You ever look up from some lonely beach and see a far schooner? Well, when I write this poem, each phrase go be soaked in salt; I go draw and knot every line as tight as ropes in this rigging; in simple speech my common language go be the wind, my pages the sails of the schooner Flight. But let me tell you how this business begin. -- Derek Walcott

 Section 1 of "The Schooner 'Flight'", from "The Star-Apple Kingdom", 1980.

 "The Schooner 'Flight'" is a truly marvellous poem. Walcott/Shabine's
odyssey through the past and present of the Caribbean is rich in symbolism
and history; it's full of wonderfully quotable truths:
        "I have Dutch, nigger, and English in me
        and either I'm nobody, or I'm a nation."
 But for me, what makes the poem special is its language. Walcott begins in
stately, flowing English, but as the lines go by, the cadence of the
Caribbean seeps into his verse like summer sunshine, until his words are
"soaked in salt", his "pages the sails of the schooner Flight". Like I said,
truly marvellous.

thomas.

[Moreover]

Is it plagiarism to reproduce one's own work? Or merely laziness? Either
way, it doesn't bother me overmuch :). Here's part of my commentary to a
previous Walcott poem on the Minstrels; much of what I wrote about
"Midsummer, Tobago" (Poem #993) applies equally well to today's poem:

Walcott's poems are about voyages. Not necessarily physical ones; he's
equally concerned with the links that connect past and present, and the
journeys of the mind between them. He fills his verse with ruminations on
the nature of memory and the creative imagination, the history, politics and
landscape of the West Indies, his own life and loves, and his enduring
awareness of time and death. These themes are explored with insight and
tact; they are also, in Walcott's hands, infused with the rarest of
qualities, a sense of _place_.

Walcott's poems are excellent proof of the fact that it is possible to write
"poetically" using free verse. His language is elegant and evocative and
never forced; his merging of various linguistic influences (the vibrant
Creole of his native Caribbean, the stately Latin and Greek of the
classics,the workaday English of his Boston years) gives his poetry a
richness and texture lost to many more traditional poets, while the absence
of formal structure gives it a suppleness equal to the demands of his
themes.

thomas.

I Sit and Look Out -- Walt Whitman

Guest poem submitted by David Wright

(Poem #1042) I Sit and Look Out I sit and look out upon all the sorrows of the world, and upon all oppression and shame; I hear secret convulsive sobs from young men, at anguish with themselves, remorseful after deeds done; I see, in low life, the mother misused by her children, dying, neglected, gaunt, desperate; I see the wife misused by her husband--I see the treacherous seducer of young women; I mark the ranklings of jealousy and unrequited love, attempted to be hid--I see these sights on the earth; I see the workings of battle, pestilence, tyranny--I see martyrs and prisoners; I observe a famine at sea--I observe the sailors casting lots who shall be kill'd, to preserve the lives of the rest; I observe the slights and degradations cast by arrogant persons upon laborers, the poor, and upon negroes, and the like; All these--All the meanness and agony without end, I sitting, look out upon, See, hear, and am silent. -- Walt Whitman

    (from 'Leaves of Grass', 1900)

Monday's Yeats poem [Poem #1040] reminded me so much of this Walt Whitman
verse, I had to share it. Whitman looks at the world's load of woe, and is
silent. Of course he is not silent. His watching is witnessing, and what he
sees he says. For a poet this is enough, more than enough. Although his
words are far from objective, to overtly comment, to share his opinion would
reduce the enormity of what he describes. Whitman as witness.

- David

On Being Asked for a War Poem -- William Butler Yeats

Guest poem sent in by Suresh Ramasubramanian

(Poem #1040) On Being Asked for a War Poem I think it better that in times like these A poet keep his mouth shut, for in truth We have no gift to set a statesman right; He has had enough of meddling who can please A young girl in the indolence of her youth, Or an old man upon a winter's night. -- William Butler Yeats

Yeats wrote this little beauty on being asked to come up with "a war poem"
in 1919 - part of his anthology "The Wild Swans at Coole".

I _really_ like it.  Short, to the point, and wonderfully sarcastic.
There is no point at all to war, Yeats seems to say, and still less
point in writing long paeans to the glorious heroes of Britain,
conquerors of the Hun.  Beyond this, the poem speaks for itself, I think.

--srs