Lux aeterna: Paul Stevens

Alas, there is need for a second post today--alas, for it too is about a death. Poet and culture-maker and lovely man Paul Stevens died this morning in Australia, with all his family about him. Thanks to poet Janet Alexa Kenny for letting his many fans and friends know. I'm thinking of the close of his poem about Tasmania: "At last to sail free / Between southern capes / Thick with kelp and wild foam, / With wave awash, surging, / Late sun on the headland,  / And shadow down valley / Past all memory."

The Flea.
Cover image by Mark Bulwinkle.

Born in Yorkshire, Paul Stevens lived in Australia for most of his life. He graduated from the University of Sydney with an Honours degree in Early English Literature and Language, and studied history and archaeology as well. He taught history and literature in New South Wales, where he lived with his wife and family. He was a wide-ranging reader and thinker and generous to many.

Many of us are grateful to his work in founding magazines of formal poetry. The Shit Creek Review. Chimaera. The Flea. I tend to think the marvelous Flea his crowning glory as a magazine founder, as it is so very different from all other poetry magazines and so interesting in its relation to literary history--binding his love of Renaissance and metaphysical poetry to his love for his contemporaries. Artist Makoto Fujimura has talked about "caring for our culture." Paul Stevens was an example, a caretaker of culture.

Pax tecum, Paul Stevens, father and teacher, maker of poems and marvelous 'zines. I wish that I had known you sooner; I am glad that I knew you in the marvelous aether of the internet, where minds brush against one another despite all distance in space. Even now your words and your poetry 'zines touch us, although we are severed from you in time.

The Relics 

Archaeologists in Italy have unearthed two skeletons 
thought to be 5,000 to 6,000 years old, locked in an embrace. 
Their sex has not yet been determined. (BBC)

Mother to daughter, softly touching, is it?
Sister to sister's delicate embrace?
Friend to friend, companions past corruption?
Brother to brother, face to well-loved face?

The wheat crop rippled in the heat, the cattle
Grazed sweet grass, milk splashed in bowls of clay;
All fell to dust; from dust these rise, recovered
As brush and trowel lift slow time away.

Lover to lover, holding all that's dear,
They gaze into each other's eyes, long blind,
Stripped back to bony gesture: stubborn relics,
So much of earth, so much of human kind.

     Originally published in Poemeleon, reprinted in The Hypertexts

Red King Red King Red King

The Red King and the Fool are popular fellows. They seem to be liked everywhere they go, thus far. I haven’t sent many out as yet, but here’s where online poems stand.

Up today in The Flea are “The Red King’s Sword,”

http://www.the-flea.com/Issue13/TheRedKingsSword.html
“What the Fool Whispered to the Wentletrap,”

http://www.the-flea.com/Issue13/WhattheFoolWhisperedtothe.html
and “Jeux de Pages.

http://www.the-flea.com/Issue13/JeuxdePages.html

Here are the also out-and-about and the forthcoming:

“About the Red Book” in Mezzo Cammin

“The King and the Fool” in Mezzo Cammin

“The Birthday Cap” in Mezzo Cammin

“The Starry Fool” in Mezzo Cammin

“The Two Tables” in Mezzo Cammin

“The Moon of Precious Wentletrap” in Mezzo Cammin

“The Turret Stairs” in Mezzo Cammin

“Directions for a Birthday Hat” in Mezzo Cammin

http://www.mezzocammin.com/iambic.php?vol=2010&iss=2&cat=poetry&page=youmans

“The Birthday Roses” at qarrtsiluni, with a podcast and more than fifty comments (very pleasing!):

http://qarrtsiluni.com/2011/01/24/two-poems-from-the-plant-kingdom/#comments

You may also find “Wielding the Tree Finder” there!

“The Fool’s Confession” forthcoming in June, Mezzo Cammin.

“The Red King’s Blossom-Tide” forthcoming in June, Mezzo Cammin

“The Rose of Laughter, Laughter of the Rose” in June, Mezzo Cammin

“The Grail,” in June, Mezzo Cammin

“Scholastic Interlude,” forthcoming in June, Mezzo Cammin

“’My Poor Fool is Hang’d,’” forthcoming in December, Mezzo Cammin

“The Fool and the Sublime,” forthcoming in December, Mezzo Cammin

“The Desire for the Red King,” forthcoming in December, Mezzo Cammin

“All Hallowed Angels Say,” forthcoming in December, Mezzo Cammin

“The Peacock’s Tail,” forthcoming in December, Mezzo Cammin

Can you tell that I like Mezzo Cammin and its bright editor, poet Kim Bridgford? Lots of my other poems from forthcoming books are there. And I look forward to meeting her in June.

And a reminder: pre-order discounts are still on for The Throne of Psyche. http://thepalaceat2.blogspot.com/2011/02/throne-of-psyche-pre-order-discounts.html
Photograph courtesy of Vangelis Thomaidis of Athens and sxc.hu.

Readings for the 12 Days of Christmas: "Mark this Flea"

On the third day of Christmas, I'm recommending an online 'zine, The Flea, edited by that cunning man, Paul Stevens.

In the Flea's own words: THE FLEA Broadsheets are a Seventeenth Century brainchild of Mr. Paul Stevens, upon whom the conviction periodically seizes that he dwelt in that era in a former life, and indeed was an associate of Jack Donne (one of whose metaphysical meditations has inspired the title), Andrew Marvell, Will. Shake-speare, Ben Jonson, Sir John Suckling, & diverse others.

The intent of THE FLEA broadsheets is to serve the Soveraigne Muse, by publishing first-rate poems which accord with Her Ideal of poetic Delight, in an occasional Broadsheet, using cutting-edge Seventeenth Century Technology, & state-of-the-art Alchemy; as wrought by the excellent skills of Mr. Peter Bloxsom of Netpublish, a cunning & learned Doctor of the dark electric Arts, who, in devising this Metaphysical Flea, to hop nimbly along the Hermetic threads of the Ætheric Web, is a very Dædalus for Craft, & yet himself a poet of most subtle Wit and Cadence, an Orpheus who masterfully plucks the poetic Lyre.

Sample poems, plucked from the swollen belly of The Flea, follow. For more poems or to learn something about these poems, sproing upward like the hoppingest flea to http://www.the-flea.com.


The Drift Glass
by Cally Conan-Davies

Along the spit of shell-packed sand,
while combing for the green, the blue,
the rarer bits of washed-up glass,

I nearly didn’t bend to take
the common piece of bottle-brown;
but shapes embossed across its face

intrigued me, so I picked it up
and found ‘TO BE’—a fragment phrase.
I showed it to a fisherman

and asked him what it might have meant.
He rubbed the risen words, and said:
“A warning. ‘POISON’ once it read,

‘NOT TO BE TAKEN’”. But it was.
The ocean took what hand had tossed,
dulled its gleam with salt and sent

the hazard to be broken up
by tides, the edges blunted by
the run of water over it

and let it drift onto this spit
as if pronouncing from the sea
the curse, the cure, the cusp—to me.


Takeoff
by Janet Kenny

Fasten your seat belt, close your eyes, ignore
the musical panic caused by what you hear,
count very slowly as the engines roar,
clutch at the arm rest as the time draws near
for that unstable moment as the vast
body turns round and moves towards the spot
where it will snarl and tear along so fast
that you relive your past, then like a shot,
up, bumping through the cloud towards the sun
breaking the hold of earth with jolts till high,
suddenly freedom floats you through the spun
wisps Leonardo dreamed of in a sky
he never saw except inside his brain.
You are his heir, through you he lives again.

While I claim to have swooped down on these fleas and pinched them between my fingers with an arbitrary hand, I am not quite telling the truth here, because who can resist plucking up a ditty with the swinging name of "Whigamaleerie," by a poet named Snoddie?

Whigmaleerie
by Alec Snoddie

Oh what a pass we’ve reached, dear wife,
worn down by constant stress and strife,
the arguments like knife on knife,
**the world grown dreary.
Of all but gentler drums and fife
**my heart is weary.

Once, and counting this no fault,
I lived at a lick with hardly a halt.
You mind when I glaggered for sweet and salt
**and was hearty and beery?
But now I am wed tae the merciless malt,
**and oh, my dearie!

The Flea is stout with blood, and you may find Clive James and Ann Drysdale and Anna Evans and many another swimming about in its great blood-belly. Enjoy!

"It suck'd me first, and now sucks thee": the 4th FLEA

THE FLEA, broadsheet no. 4

Like the very best sort of vampire--not sparkly, not sappy, and juicy with blood--The Flea leaps onto the stage of the mortal world.

Contents
Editorial
Epigraphic poem: Borrowed Tactics by Mark Allinson
Dionysus and Apollo by Thomas Zimmerman
The Memoir Artists by Marly Youmans
When Jesus Was Grown by Gail White
The Reading by Timothy Murphy
Sticking Point by Rick Mullin
The Auguries Road-Kill by David W. Landrum
Buried Lines by Rose Kelleher
Double or Quits by Clive James
Genesis by Jan Iwaszkiewicz
Practising by Midge Goldberg
There at the Frontier by Richard Epstein
On Correctness by Ann Drysdale
Valediction: Demanding Remorse by Kevin Cutrer
Twickenham Stadium by Norman Ball
Down Slope by Gene Auprey
Bell’s Theorem by Mark Allinson
What Light I Can Conjure by Mary Alexandra Agner

Clock of the Moon and Stars at "The Flea"

The Flea is a wondrous new 'zine, marked by the rare imagination and verve of Paul Stevens. What a sparkling, spanking-new idea for a literary magazine: http://www.the-flea.com/index.html: "THE FLEA Broadsheets are a Seventeenth Century brainchild of Mr. Paul Stevens, upon whom the conviction periodically seizes that he dwelt in that era in a former life, and indeed was an associate of Jack Donne (one of whose metaphysical meditations has inspired the title), Andrew Marvell, Will. Shake-speare, Ben Jonson, Sir John Suckling, & diverse others." Portrait of the esteemed editor is by Mistress Patricia Jones.

And here I am with my first contribution to this cunningly-designed magazine: http://www.the-flea.com/Issue2/ClockoftheMoonandStars.html