sunday poetry: hoax!

Petit Testament - Ern Malley

In the twenty-fifth year of my age
I find myself to be a dromedary
That has run short of water between
One oasis and the next mirage
And having despaired of ever
Making my obsessions intelligible
I am content at last to be
The sole clerk of my metamorphoses.
Begin here:

In the year 1943
I resigned to the living all collateral images
Reserving to myself a man’s
Inalienable right to be sad
At his own funeral.
(Here the peacock blinks the eyes
of his multipennate tail.)
In the same year
I said to my love (who is living)
Dear we shall never be that verb
Perched on the sole Arabian Tree
Not having learnt in our green age to forget
The sins that flow between the hands and feet
(Here the Tree weep gum tears
Which are also real: I tell you
These things are real)
So I forced a parting
Scrubbing my few dingy words to brightness.

Where I have lived
The bed-bug sleeps in the seam, the cockroach
Inhabits the crack and the careful spider
Spins his aphorisms in the comer.
I have heard them shout in the streets
The chiliasms of the Socialist Reich
And in the magazines I have read
The Popular Front-to-Back.
But where I have lived
Spain weeps in the gutters of Footscray
Guernica is the ticking of the clock
The nightmare has become real, not as belief
But in the scrub-typhus of Mubo.

It is something to be at last speaking
Though in this No-Man’s-language appropriate
Only to No-Man’s-Land.
Set this down too:
I have pursued rhyme, image, and metre,
Known all the clefts in which the foot may stick,
Stumbled often, stammered,
But in time the fading voice grows wise
And seizing the co-ordinates of all existence
Traces the inevitable graph
And in conclusion:
There is a moment when the pelvis
Explodes like a grenade. I
Who have lived in the shadow that each act
Casts on the next act now emerge
As loyal as the thistle that in session
Puffs its full seed upon the indicative air.
I have split the infinite. Beyond is anything.

this is a fun sunday poetry.

the poem you've just read is one part of what is considered to be the twentieth century's greatest literary hoax. the poems were written by a couple of soldiers, writers themselves, who hated the modern poetry being published in australia at the time (the 1940s). so these two sat down one afternoon and made up a poet. they called him ern malley (because "mal" in french means "bad"), gave him a sufficiently tragic back story, found old photos and said they were his. then within a few hours they wrote 16 pages of incoherent poetry with vague hints at meaning and quotes from all over and sent them in to a publication they really hated. the editor loved the writing and published it all. and everyone else loved it too. and even today ern malley is supposed to be one of the faces of modern poetry. ha. ha. ha. art really has nothing to do with its creator, does it.

this is a good story to remember especially these days.

read the whole story here (it's very entertaining) and all of ern malley's mal poems here!

alma maaaaaater

jaya posted her school song on her blog and i loved reading it like that, out of context, without a conception of a tune, but just being able to imagine what it must have sounded like when a few hundred kids sang it together.

i was in st. anne's. and they made us call ourselves "annites". i learned the term "alma mater" from my school song. here it is :)

come annites gather now
with faith unshaken
let deep integrity
our heaaaaarts awaken
life's journey starts from you
we lift our hearts anew
all striving to be true
our alma maaaaaater

knowledge and love trust
daily engendered
and pace of mind from duty
noooobly rendered
the lives we lead will be
symbols of harmony
and truth we learn from thee
our alma maaaaaater

lead us o light from heaven
brighten our pathway
strength from within give us
to choooose the right way
where in the world we go
let hope and courage show
that we will always know
our alma maaaaaaater

lini_ment

you know you've been around pain killers too long when you start appreciating the art work on the labels, but i've got to say this bottle of sloan's liniment has a gorgeous old world charm. it's a bad picture so you can't tell but in person (in bottle) it looks awesome with its rough matt paper label and mr earl sloan's o-so-manly portrait (and the word "liniment"!). it's been around since the seventeenth century and it really looks like it. plus the simple, straightforward "kills pain" is great messaging. no?



ok i know this is sort of sick. i'm going to go now.

but ps: nash, it contains capsicum extract!

sunday poetry: rives - kite

rives is one of the best slam poets out there. this is a clip of his from an hbo show called def poetry jam that should really really air in india. this poem's called "kite".



another one of his i love is dirty talk.

he's even got four ted talks! the emoticons one is my favorite.

ps: i just discovered he also makes crazy complex pop-up books. wah!

nerf

just picked up my book and found someone had slipped this fern inside it!
what a pretty surprise.

silver + print + coffee + typewriter

sludge:



dramaqueen:


my manic and i...

van gogh in a taxi to mahim

we had to transport a framed print of van gogh's self portrait to mahim by taxi. milann took pictures.



Paul Gauguin: All I see when I look at your paintings is just that you paint too fast.
Vincent Van Gogh: You look too fast!

train song - feist + ben gibbard

i'm crazily loving the vibe of this song right now.



(it's teeny tiny because it's audio only)

ephelant

milann puts together things i say and do in strange ways sometimes and i just stare like an intoxicated elephant.

ps: there's a secret link to some mad-ass music. why? don't ask me why.

sunday ke sunday

i get so caught up with work, weeks can go by and i won't have read a single poem. so i'm setting a reminder for myself to at least read (and post) one poem every sunday. at least. last sunday's was here, and this is today's.

The Palestinians Have Given Up Parties by Naomi Shihab Nye

Once singing would rise
in sweet sirens over the hills
and even if you were working
with your trees or books
or cooking something simple
for your own family,
you washed your hands,
combed water through your hair.

Mountains of rice, shiny shoes,
a hurricane of dancing.
Children wearing little suitcoats
and velvet dresses fell asleep in circles
after eating 47 Jordan almonds.

Who's getting married? Who's come home
from the far place over the seas?

Sometimes you didn't even know.
You ate all of that food without knowing.
Kissed both cheeks of anyone who passed,
slapping the drum, reddening your palm.
Later you were full, rich,
with a party in your skin.

Where does fighting
come into this story?

Fighting got lost from somewhere else.
It is not what we like: to eat, to drink, to fight.

Now when the students gather quietly
inside their own classroom
to celebrate the last day of school,
the door to the building
gets blasted off.
Empty chairs where laughter used to sit.
Laughter lived here
jiggling its pocket of thin coins
and now it is hiding.

It will not come to the door dressed as a soapseller,
a peddler of matches, the old Italian
from the factory in Nablus
with his magic sack of sticks.

They have told us we are not here
when we were always here.
The eraser does not work.

See the hand-tinted photos of young men:
too perfect, too still.
The bombs break everyone's
sentences in half.
Who made them? Do you know anyone
who makes them? The ancient taxi driver
shakes his head back and forth
from Jerusalem to Jericho.
They will not see, he says slowly,
the story behind the story,
they are always looking for the story after the story
which means they will never understand the story.

Which means it will go on and on.

How can we stand it if it goes on and on?
It is too long already.
No one even gets a small bent postcard
from the far place over the seas anymore.

No one hears the soldiers come at night
to pluck the olive tree from its cool sleep.

Ripping up roots. This is not a headline
in your country or mine.
No one hears the tiny sobbing
of the velvet in the drawer.

(thank you i eat poetry.)