Geoff Arnold

Sassoon's "Statement Against The Continuation Of The War - July 1917"

My colleague Richard just posted a piece reminding us of Siegfried Sassoon's powerful protest against the exploitation of the honour and duty of soldiers by the ignorant and cynical. He also links to a fascinating CD by David Behrman based on correspondence between his father and Sassoon. I've just ordered the CD; I'll review it when it arrives.

Risking everything

A few days ago I picked up a copy of Roger Housden's anthology Risking Everything: 110 Poems of Love and Revelation. Today I opened it at a random page, and suddenly felt compelled to start reading the poem out loud. It was D. H. Lawrence's Deeper Than Love, and I found myself reading it slowly, lingering over the words, tasting them, feeling their weight on my tongue.

Love, like the flowers, is life, growing.
But underneath are the deep rocks, the living rock that lives alone
and deeper still the unknown fire, unknown and heavy, heavy and alone.

The noise of the air conditioner in the kitchen drowned my speech (it's a miserable night, dew point around 75, no central air) which was good: I was only reading for myself. I finished the Lawrence, and opened again at random: Billy Collins' This Much I Do Remember. Not a poem to read out loud, this one, but one to close your eyes and see what the poet had seen:

that I could feel it being painted within me
brushed on the wall of my skull

And of course all of Housden's favourites are here, like old familiar friends: Rumi, Bly, and above all Mary Oliver. What a glorious collection.

Armistice

Terry wrote: ""On the 11th hour, of the 11th day of the year 1918 all fighting shall cease on the Western Front"

And so came the Armistice. The peace of the world was to follow. It had been a war, to end all wars.

But it wasn't."

(From Better Than Salt Money.)

Poems: Mary Oliver

Through reading Roger Housden's extraordinary "Ten Poems..." anthologies (starting with Ten Poems to Change Your Life) I have become aware of the poems of Mary Oliver. (OK, I'm slow... Google shows over 52,000 hits for her name. At least I got there eventually.) My first impression was of an impatient Walt Whitman: a combination of transcendent vision with a fierce and uncompromising urgency. These are Emergency Broadcast System messages to one's inner heart: save the only life you can: your own. Consider the opening of The Journey:

One day you finally knew
what you had to do, and began,
though the voices around you
kept shouting
their bad advice--
though the whole house
began to tremble
and you felt the old tug
at your ankles.

But the message is not always a call to action: here are the opening lines of her Mockingbirds:

This morning
two mockingbirds
in the green field
were spinning and tossing

better to do
than listen.
I mean this
seriously.

As I read more of Mary Oliver, I have come to reallize that those first few poems that I encountered in no way define or constrain her. There are many sides to Oliver's work: romantic, visionary, organic, mimetic, mythic; above all grounded in nature. And yet I find myself particularly drawn to these direct, imperative pieces: Journey, the shocking West Wind 2, the absolution of Wild Geese, or the exhortation of Have You Ever Tried To Enter The Long Black Branches?, with its blunt question:

Listen, are you breathing just a little, and calling it a life?

Well? Are you?

Library

Terry Karney's blog pointed me at this wonderful poem. Here are the first few lines....

This book saved my life.
This book takes place on one of the two small tagalong moons of Mars.
This book requests its author's absolution, centuries after his death.
This book required two of the sultan's largest royal elephants to bear it; this other book fit in a gourd.
This book reveals The Secret Name of God, and so its author is on a death list.

Yes, it's vaguely reminiscent of David Moser's self-referential tour de force (published by Douglas Hofstadter in Metamagical Themas), but it's a much more beautiful and thought-provoking piece. Pass it on.