PICS
Have to admit that I was surprised by the huge numbers of people who wanted to weigh in on what my author picture should be... so many bossy, nosy, imaginative, funny people, particularly via facebook but also in other places. So here is another chance if you feel like being a smart-aleck or keen-eyed or wise judge: Marly at 65 board. I need one for a novel, one for a book of poems.
FICTION/ POETRY
News of the moment: you can read a piece of my fiction, "Prospero's Island," at the new Big Apple issue of Revelator Magazine, brainchild of Eric Schaller and Matt Cheney. And you can read one of my poems as well--"The White Orchard." So you could have Miranda and Caliban and Prospero and Isaac Newton on this lovely winter's day... Plus a lot of other interesting work by Richard Bowes, Craig Gidney, Chad Wood, and more. (Even Old Ezra!)
LAPTOP
Laptop still in agonies... Let's just hope the Time Machine releases all my files on a repaired or new laptop by the middle of next week... Otherwise I will spend the next few years typing manuscripts!
THE WHITE ORCHARD There should more of this. Poetry that catches those most poetic of high jumps, from full bovine ignorance up into a state of seeing that has the same effect (though not for the same reason) as Matilda's lies:
ReplyDeleteThey made one gasp and stretched one's eyes
With Marly's special adornments. Not a humdrum apple but a Flower-of-Kent. And I who was born with a caul over my face (Thus I will not die from drowning) find to my delight that Marly-ish invention has turned this insubstantial membrane into a verb. Meanwhile the argument winds its sinuous way to touch on things that are not of my world yet are permissible since they were of Newton's. Who, incidentally, was a true SOB. Not just that but an SOB with power. But one can't have everything.
Best of all I enjoyed the sustained line which holds it all together like the string of a drawstring bag. All thirty-eight lines in one beguiling exhalation.
Chapeau my dear.
I had a go myself, but shorter and not in the same league.
Sonnet – Lead kindly light
I sigh, I pluck the lute, I turn to Keats
The world, my mistress, is too grand for me.
Her essence is a series of defeats
For my blunt intellectuality.
I ache with lust and would grasp more of her
If I could understand her secrecy
But she is power and charm and gold and myrrh
Bound in the maths of atomicity.
I may not love her but at least I flirt
With tiny glimpses of her gorgeousness
The lens of science renders me alert
To here and there within her boundlessness
I’m pandered to by Maxwell, Gauss and Bohr
Whose flashes lit the dark I now abhor.
NOTE:
(1) Atomicity is a made-up word.
I'm always surprised when people go and read poems that I mention--you may be the only one! Congratulations. Glad you liked the poem. Newton does seem infinitely various... He probably deserves not 38 lines (did you count? must have) but a whole book to try and compass him.
DeleteAnd you are, I believe, the only person who ever responds to me with another poem! Thank you for that. I am highly privileged! Clever sonnet--the lust for female creation, ending with panderers. Bohr-abhor! What a rhyme... Thank you, my alliterative friend. Much, much appreciated.
I did enjoy both poem and story, though I should say that I am not much of a judge of poems on first encountering them. At the end of the story one seems to have Caliban imagining himself Papageno.
ReplyDeleteSomewhere in many years of working with computers, I remember to have see the statement "Blessed are the pessimists, for they have made backups." I don't do enough of that myself, but perhaps you should do more.
My comments seems to have evaporated... Perhaps I deleted them when cleaning up spam!
DeleteI'm glad you enjoyed them, and am sympathetic with not judging at first with poems. Poems are often more demanding of us, I suppose.
I need to figure out new computer strategies. I signed up for iCloud, then realized that a lot ends up in the cloud and not on the computer. Confusion!
I loved the Caliban story; I think he's one of the most sympathetic characters in Shakespeare. Do you know the Robert Browning poem about him?
ReplyDeleteMore confusion, more missing comments... New computer and new issues, agh!
DeleteThank you for liking the story and saying so; I liked Browning long ago and am thinking that I really must reread him. I just reread "Caliban upon Setebos" and liked Browning all over again. Caliban is a curious creation, and I imagine that every age sees him differently, and believes his particulars point to something else than all the others.
I do mean to catch up with your poetry enterprises after I recover from the computer disaster and turn in overdue work! I was enjoying your progress.