Ogden Nash

From the title it could be Whitman or Frost or Kerouac – or from Paint my Wagon – or Mr Toad. It is one of the poems I thought I knew by heart, but I have always said ‘in fact’ rather than ‘indeed’. Indeed.

I have always been uncertain as to the extent his poems are non-establishment, alternative, rather than amusingly intelligent takes on aspects of the world, but this poem can be taken at several levels of depth – the artificial coming between us and the natural world.

Died after eating improperly prepared coleslaw:

“Ogden eat some poor coleslaw

Nash his teeth he is no more”

Ogden Nash ‘Song of the Open Road’ 1961

Song of the Open Road

 

Ogden Nash

  

I think that I shall never see

A billboard lovely as a tree.

Indeed, unless the billboards fall

I’ll never see a tree at all.

  

From Ogden Nash ‘Collected Verse from 1929 0n’ J.M Dent & Sons (1961) p.65

Kathleen Jones

I have a friend who uprooted herself in the way the poem says. I do not know if she should see this, to know her situation and her feelings shared. It is a subject unusual in poetry, unusual to some extent in life. It could be deeply hurtful or comforting.

Coming from a hill farm in the English Lake District, again she is coming from one of the landscapes familiar to me. She is a biographer of Norman Nicholson – and I will look out for that, one of my favourite poets – if I had had to pick one collection out of all I had it might have been Nicholson’s ‘The Pot Geranium’. But it would be hard to separate that from the rest, his religion was not insistent, his humanity always was, and his humour, and sometimes his anger.

But enough of that. Here in a short poem is a big story. We can see the abusive relationship that cannot be escaped publicly, but that has to be fled; the worry over the children left behind; the desire to take nothing away that might be wanted; the certainty that the story will be told in such a way that all the blame will fall on the unwomanly woman.

It is a commonplace of criminology that women who murder children are judged more harshly by the public, and perhaps by the courts, because their action is seen to be a betrayal of what is expected of a woman, nurturing, caring, mothering. So it is of the woman who walks away. The man who abandons his family is seen to have behaved badly, but society will not judge him as harshly as it will judge the woman.

Kathleen Jones ‘On Leaving Children’ 1994

On Leaving Children

 

Kathleen Jones

  

You always imagined they

would be the ones to leave

with tears and suitcases.

Not you, packing the car at night

taking only what you know

they won’t need.

 

Not good at leaving are you?

Unrehearsed.

Tripped by that long cord

you thought was cut at birth

still pulsing with maternal blood.

 

Clumsy with failure

star of your own tragedy

you step out into childless silence

bereaved by your own exit.

 

Blamed.

  

From Kathleen Jones ‘Unwritten Lives’ Redbeck Press (1994) p23

Grace Nichols

One has to admire a poem based on its antithesis, Whitmans ‘I Sing the Body Electric’; a poem in a volume from someone so indolent that they have also stolen the title from Jerome K Jerome; a volume that begins with short hymns to ‘Dust’ and to ‘Grease’. The poem itself is a paean to the healthiness of not being too clean.

She lives in Lewes, so in spite of her Guyanese birth, she is another Sussex poet – if not similar to Kipling. I might have met her in the street, I grew up just outside the town, went to school there, went drinking there, got married (once) there, wandered round quite often later.

The poem itself has words that stand out the ‘lolling’ breast can be both utterly relaxed and erotic; the blood flows slowly, like ‘a river in its lower course’ (the Ouse perhaps), and four times she sings ‘The Body Reclining’, a Maja, Goethe on his way to Rome, Monroe.

Grace Nichols ‘The Body Reclining’ 1989

The Body Reclining 

Grace Nichols

(With a thought for Walt) 

 

I sing the body reclining

I sing the throwing back of self

I sing the cushioned head

The fallen arm

The lolling breast

I sing the body reclining

As an indolent continent

 

I sing the body reclining

I sing the easy breathing ribs

I sing the horizontal neck

I sing the slow-moving blood

Sluggish as a river

In its lower course

 

I sing the weighing thighs

The idle toes

The liming knees*

I sing the body reclining

As a wayward tree

 

I sing the restful nerve

 

Those who scrub and scrub

incessantly

corrupt the body

 

Those who dust and dust

incessantly

also corrupt the body

 

And are caught in the asylum

Of their own making

Therefore I sing the body reclining

 

* ‘liming’ is a West Indian expression for standing around, idling away the time (a Grace note)

 

From Grace Nichols ‘Lazy thoughts of a Lazy Woman and other poems’ Virago (1989) p.4

 

Ted Walker

A poem for all the allotmenteers, gardeners, would be self-sufficers out there.

A Sussex poet for a change. Although Yorkshire born, and resident for more than the past thirty years, I grew up in Sussex so feel at home with this.

There is much that I like in this beyond the sentiment.

There is the underlying sense of imminent loss of the individual the ‘one more harvest’, ‘one more fortnight of surfeit’ that he hopes to see, balanced against the continuity of cycles, the other lives carrying on, the trees, the chickens, the rooks – not those individuals perhaps, but the idea of rook.

There is the word I thought a neologism ‘quobbled’ sounding such an onomatopoeic description of the bubbling of fruit in the jam pan. I find it is a nineteenth century Wiltshire word to describe

http://www.wordsandphrasesfromthepast.com/blog/quobbled

a wrinkledness that could also apply to the fruit in the pan.

There are phrases that echo:

“Lifted potatoes that in scattered patterns lay

through the dark to dry”

Perhaps it just chimes and rhymes in my mind with Shelley’s ‘lone and level sands stretch far away‘.

I am also starting to ponder the use of the hyphen as poetic device.

Ted Walker died in 2004. After early success he seemed to lose the facility with poetry until this later flowering in his forties. I will be looking earlier too.

Ted Walker ‘Gardener’ 1978

Gardener

 

Ted Walker

 

New Year’s Eve (a shag rug

the lawn, coarse with hoar-frost), rooks

spread wide wings in his emptied apple-trees.

They lift when he scares them

 

and caw, raucous, over the lily-pool.

Wafer ice is locking the apple-leaves

to tossed bundles, wads of dead feathers

after a rook-shoot.

 

All he’d wish this wintertide

is one more harvest, the barrowloads

he’d wheel back of another autumn’s

superabundance.

 

Plots, look, are double-dug, pruning’s done,

sleet blossoms into snow. Blunted light

in the creosote shed picks tools

lavished with Vaseline

 

tidy for spring.  The floor stinks of fish-meal,

oil seeps from the power-mower. He longs

for the scent of clean, fresh-broken soil,

plunges a fist into

 

pressed moss peat that would burst from the bale.

Months must pass before next planting,

trowel and trug be draped with cobweb

and catalogues

 

keep from damp in orderly columns the seeds

he’ll buy in due season. For the used earth

rests. Its limed clods will slide at the thaw

to crumble to tilth

 

in its own good time. Nothing, now, to tend

but bonfires. Today he crafts with tarred cord,

grease bands. He smears, ties tight each bole,

while he remembers

 

windfalls, waspy, softening in the marigolds

where, also, the cricket ball fell

evening by evening till final summer collapsed

toward October.

 

His crops were ready, that first fall night.

Lifted potatoes in scattered patterns lay

through the dark to dry. In sacks he grappled them

muscular as wrestlers,

 

flung spent haulms to the yellowing pit.

Then: curds of cauliflower felt his knife,

ungloved were the fleshed broad beans, peas

rolled into colanders

 

and the kitchen busied. Kilner-jars stacked,

brim-packed with peaches and blackberries;

acrid in boiled vinegar, specked vegetables

browned into chutney;

 

red-currants, plums quobbled in the jam-kettle;

rhubarb and spinach bricked up the deep-freeze;

boxes crammed, ponderous the Conference pears

in tissue-paper.

 

And, as suddenly, the glut was done. Freed,

his pullets scratched and pecked all he’d missed.

The last Bramley picked, he replaced the ladder,

forked out the hen-house.

 

May cold sweeten the crudded litter, rain

leach it down. One more fortnight of surfeit

surely will come: enough to serve his own,

stuff to give away,

 

some that must waste or feed the wild birds.

He stares up, beyond his twigs, beyond his rooks

past space he is patient will brighten from solstice

into equinox.

 

From Ted Walker ‘Burning the Ivy’ Jonathan Cape (1978) p.23

Fleur Adcock

I am late in posting. Two days in Staithes finishing today with nine miles along the coastal path, the Cleveland Way.

I wanted to include this because it is a poem we should each write. Until we put out ambitions, no matter how bizarre, in writing they are daydreams. From the moment of writing they are aspirations, no matter how bizarre.

The poems are real, the rest will be things thought of I am sure.

When reading the final line I insert a comma half way.

A short note, but it is late, and I want to fit into my day.

Fleur Adcock ‘Future Work’ before 1993

Future Work 

Fleur Adcock

 

‘Please send future work’ – Editor’s note on a rejection slip

 

It is going to be a splendid summer.

The apple tree will be thick with golden russets

expanding weightily in the soft air.

I shall finish the brick wall beside the terrace

and plant out all the geranium cuttings.

Pinks and carnations will be everywhere.

 

She will come out to me in the garden,

her bare feet on the cut grass,

bringing jasmine tea and strawberries on a tray.

I shall be correcting the proofs of my novel

(third in a trilogy – simultaneous publication

in four continents), and my latest play

 

will be in production at the Aldwych

starring Glenda Jackson and Paul Scofield

with Olivier brilliant in a minor part.

I shall probably have finished my translations

of Persian creation myths and the Pre-Socratics

(drawing new parallels) and be ready to start

 

on Lucretius. But first I’ll take a break

at the chess championships in Manila –

on present form, I’m fairly likely to win.

And poems? Yes, there will certainly be poems:

they sing in my head, they tingle along my nerves,

It is all magnificently about to begin

 

 Reprinted in Linda France (ed) Sixty Women Poets (Bloodaxe, 1993) p.22