Emporium
Page 5
forgetting
the living connection
a habit
unromantic
unforgiving
INSOMNIA
She lies awake
if only to evoke
her body
in the dark
stretching
unveiling
her shoulders
like mountains
her pulsing heart
in the dark
an illustration
in a medieval
bestiary
ridiculous, too,
married to
a death to
come.
TIME REMAINING
I
I mature
like a rich quarter of town
with its own sense of
belonging –
not through propriety but
the passage of time –
enough days to make
a life, a clearing in
the forest.
II
Fields of grain
and a good life among
companions –
their grief a gathered
worship, the track of
a difficult birth –
open bones
troubled dust.
Some are carried
through a thousand
victories
others must lay down their lives
for a sigh.
Each has his goodness stolen.
III
My sight is
a standing flower
my sound
a rejoicing people
moderate in their convictions
and secure
in the growth
of their own minds
each restless but
awakened
and no one
taking offence.
IV
I like simplicity with
fortifications.
I am without
a language
lost in the fog of being
alive
of being a singular
thing.
V
I have been
robbed.
No doubt.
The law is
a mystery but
the ultimate paradox
must be a love without
bondage.
VI
It cannot be proved
but I discern a
sensation following
a sensation
like water in its
passing away
like waves towards
a better future
without prejudice without
collective hysterical
Humanity.
VII
Can you conceive
of a life where
everything is
a fragment and never
develops
exhausting
itself through
the distance it must travel
simply to be
a fragment?
VIII
All founded on
nothing, like you
said. Only your words
found it.
NOTES
CHAIN LETTER: 1 William Langland, The Vision of Piers Plowman; 2 John Gower, Confessio Amantis; 3 Geoffrey Chaucer, The Canterbury Tales; 4 Sir Thomas Wyatt, ‘They fle from me that sometyme did me seke’; 5 Edmund Spenser, The Faerie Queene; 6 Sir Philip Sidney, Astrophil and Stella; 7 William Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night’s Dream; 8 John Donne, ‘The Broken Heart’; 9 John Milton, Paradise Lost; 10 Andrew Marvell, ‘An Horation Ode upon Cromwel’s Return from Ireland’; 11 John Dryden, ‘The Hind and the Panther’; 12 Jonathan Swift, ‘A Beautiful Young Nymph Going to Bed’; 13 Alexander Pope, ‘An Epistle to Bathurst’; 14 Thomas Gray, ‘Elegy Written in a Country Church Yard’; 15 Christopher Smart, ‘Hymn II: Circumcision’; 16 William Blake, Milton; 17 Robert Burns, ‘Tam o’Shanter’; 18 William Wordsworth, ‘Old Man Travelling’; 19 Samuel Taylor Coleridge, ‘Dejection. An Ode’; 20 George Gordon, Lord Byron, ‘The Vision of Judgment’; 21 Percy Bysshe Shelley, ‘The Sensitive-Plant’; 22 John Clare, ‘I Am’; 23 John Keats, ‘The Eve of St Agnes’; 24 Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ‘Lord Walter’s Wife’; 25 Alfred, Lord Tennyson, ‘Ulysses’; 26 Robert Browning, ‘My Last Duchess’; 27 Edward Lear, ‘The Owl and the Pussy-Cat’; 28 Walt Whitman, Leaves of Grass; 29 Matthew Arnold, ‘Dover Beach’; 30 Dante Gabriel Rossetti, ‘Sudden Light’; 31 Christina Rossetti, ‘The Thread of Life’; 32 Emily Dickinson, ‘Safe in their alabaster chambers’; 33 Lewis Carroll, ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’; 34 Algernon Charles Swinburne, ‘A Leavetaking’; 35 Thomas Hardy, ‘After a Journey’; 36 Gerald Manley Hopkins, ‘I wake and feel the fell of dark, not day’; 37 Oscar Wilde, The Ballad of Reading Gaol; 38 A.E. Housman, ‘The laws of God, the laws of man’; 39 Rudyard Kipling, ‘Mandalay’; 40 W. B. Yeats, ‘Sailing to Byzantium’; 41 Gertrude Stein, Stanzas in Meditation; 42 Wallace Stevens ‘Credences of Summer’; 43 James Joyce, ‘The Ballad of Persse O’Reilly’; 44 William Carlos Williams, Paterson III; 45 Ezra Pound, Canto XXXIX; 46 D. H. Lawrence, ‘The Mosquito’; 47 Siegfried Sassoon, ‘Everyone Sang’; 48 Marianne Moore, ‘The Mind is an Enchanting Thing’; 49 Rupert Brooke, ‘The Soldier’; 50 T. S. Eliot, ‘Lines to a Persian Cat’; 51 Wilfred Owen, ‘Strange Meeting’; 52 e. e. cummings, ‘Humanity i love you’; 53 Charles Reznikoff, Jerusalem the Golden (55); 54 Hart Crane, ‘Powhatan’s Daughter: The River’; 55 Laura Riding ‘A City Seems’; 56 Langston Hughes, ‘Cross’; 57 Stevie Smith, ‘The Jungle Husband’; 58 Lorine Neidecker, ‘Thomas Jefferson’; 59 Louis Zukofsky, 29 Poems (‘18’); 60 Kenneth Rexroth, ‘Un Bel di Vedremo’; 61 Samuel Beckett, ‘Ooftish’; 62 John Betjeman, ‘In Westminster Abbey’; 63 W. H. Auden ‘Taller to-day, we remember similar evenings’; 64 George Oppen, ‘Party on Shipboard’; 65 Charles Olson, ‘The Kingfishers’; 66 Elizabeth Bishop, ‘The Fish’; 67 John Cage ‘’25 Mesostics Re and Not Re Mark Tobey’; 68 R. S. Thomas, ‘On the Farm’; 69 Dylan Thomas, ‘Among Those Killed in the Dawn Raid was a Man Aged a Hundred’; 70 John Berryman, Dream Songs (47); 71 Robert Lowell, ‘Skunk Hour’; 72 Lawrence Ferlinghetti, ‘Autobiography’; 73 Robert Duncan, ‘A Poem Beginning with a Line by Pindar’; 74 Barbara Guest, ‘Twilight Polka Dots’; 75 Philip Larkin, ‘Church Going’; 76 Jackson Mac Low, ‘Trope Market’; 77 Philip Whalen, ‘Sourdough Mountain Lookout’; 78 James Schuyler, ‘The Crystal Lithium’; 79 Denise Levertov, ‘Stepping Westward’; 80 Kenneth Koch, ‘With Janice’; 81 Jack Spicer, ‘Phonemics’; 82 Allen Ginsberg, ‘This Form of Life Needs Sex’; 83 Frank O’Hara, ‘The Day Lady Died’; 84 Paul Blackburn, ‘The Onceover’; 85 Robert Creeley, ‘The Door’; 86 John Ashbery, ‘A Wave’; 87 Ed Dorn, Gunslinger II; 88 Thom Gunn, ‘In Santa Maria del Popolo’; 89 Gregory Corso, ‘Marriage’; 90 Gary Snyder, Myths & Texts: Burning; 91 Ted Hughes, ‘A Childish Prank’; 92 Geoffrey Hill, ‘An Apology for the Revival of Christian Architecture in England’ (‘The Laurel Axe’); 93 Sylvia Plath, ‘Nick and the Candlestick’; 94 Diane di Prima, ‘On Sitting Down to Write, I Decide Instead to Go to Fred Herko’s Concert’; 95 Ted Berrigan, ‘I Remember’; 96 Amiri Baraka, AM/TRAK; 97 Susan Howe, ‘Speeches at the Barrier’; 98 Clark Coolidge, ‘On Induction of the Hand’; 99 Seamus Heaney, ‘Station Island’; 100 Lyn Hejinian, My Life; 101 Ron Padgett, ‘Big Bluejay Composition’; 102 James Tate, ‘Nausea, Coincidence’; 103 Alice Notley, ‘Beginning with a Stain’; 104 Anne Waldman, ‘skin Meat BONES (chant)’; 105 Bernadette Mayer, ‘First turn to me … ’; 106 Ron Silliman, Paradise; 107 David Shapiro, ‘Dido to Aeneas’; 108 August Kleinzahler, ‘A Case in Point’; 109 Charles Bernstein, ‘The Klupzy Girl’; 110 Paul Muldoon, ‘The More a Man Has the More a Man Wants’; 111 Maxine Chernoff, ‘Breasts’.
CᾹRVᾹKA/LOKᾹYATA: Lokayata was a materialistic system of Hindu philosophy that flourished around the first century CE. Its founder
is said to have been Carvaka, whose dates are unknown. The writings of this school are no longer extant and all we know of it comes from the criticisms of its detractors. Cf. Cārvāka/Lokāyata: An Anthology of Source Materials and Some Recent Studies, ed. Debiprasad Chattopadhyaya (New Delhi: Indian Council of Philosophical Research, 1994).
BIG BUMPERTON ON THE SABBATH: The Outsider artist Johann Knopf was a locksmith who went insane and was diagnosed ‘paranoid form of dementia praecox’ (schizophrenia). One of his drawings is entitled Big Bumperton on the Sabbath. Knopf’s illness emerged after the death of his mother, with whom he had lived, then a subsequent unhappy marriage. He suffered from religious delusions in which he believed he was a Christian martyr and could understand the language of birds, which he considered tragic creatures.
IT TAKES A MAN: The great Emathian conqueror … Pindarus: Cf. Milton’s Sonnet VIII: ‘When the assault was intended to the City’. Alexander’s army sacked Thebes in 335 BCE, but he spared Pindar’s house and showed mercy towards the late poet’s descendents. Rodez: In 1937 the French poet and actor Antonin Artaud (1896–1948) was arrested in Dublin, repatriated and interned for nine years in a succession of psychiatric hospitals, including the asylum at Rodez in southern France. Here he created in his imagination the ‘daughters of the heart to be born’: feisty warrior-women bodyguards, based on ex-lovers (and two beloved grandmothers), who would protect him from the black magic of psychiatry.
About the Author
EMPORIUM
IAN PINDAR was born in London in 1970. He is the author of Joyce (Haus, 2004), a biography of James Joyce, and co-translated The Three Ecologies (Continuum, 2000) by the radical French theorist Félix Guattari. He was an editor at J. M. Dent, Weidenfeld & Nicolson and the Harvill Press, where he edited works by Haruki Murakami, Anna Politkovskaya and W. G. Sebald. He is now a freelance writer and editor, and regularly contributes to the Guardian and the Times Literary Supplement. He won second prize in the 2009 National Poetry Competition, was shortlisted for the 2010 Forward Prize (Best Single Poem), won a runners-up prize in the Bridport Prize 2010, and is the recipient of an award from the Arthur Welton Foundation. He lives in Oxfordshire.
Copyright
First published in 2011
by Carcanet Press Ltd, Alliance House, 30 Cross Street, Manchester M2 7AQ
This ebook edition first published in 2011
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Epub ISBN 978–1–84777–847–5
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