Odling IV: More reflections

It is absolutely fascinating to sit silently in a room while a group of people discuss your poetry and what it means to them. I felt like a ghost. It is very instructive and useful, too.

However, it is galling to realise that a group of perceptive people who have had a whole week to mull your poem over have, every single one, missed The Point (though one came close).

Obviously, the poem that follows needs some work.

I'll be posting updates as they happen but here is the original, as it met the workshop. You can do me a favour if you wish to, dear readers, by posting comments on what you think it is about, and any other thoughts on it that you might have.

Colours II

So. There I was
Walking along on the green green grass
(which was rather moist. Clear water and brown mud
squished around my no-longer-freshly-polished boots,
dappling on the shiny black. Traffic
thrmmmed, vrmmmed, thrshhmmed. There
was a definite odour of cow … …ness.)
And I thought:
The sky is blue.

Then I thought,
The sky is not blue.
Above me, the sky is lapis lazuli
(traded from Egypt, back in the day, to European monasteries,
crushed to make the mantle of Our Heavenly Queen, delicately
stitched with the gold it’s worth its weight in and,
after all that,
hidden away in a book.)

At one edge of the sky’s upended bowl
(a very big one)
Is clear crystal,
Several shades of turquoise sandwiched in between,
With a few streaks of white
(which could be the cataracts in an old woman’s eye)
like the greenstone drop I gave my grandmother
(of pounamu, jade, the king stone, of kahurangi that
is also the sky, my dear, and precious)
And a brightness somewhere up there
Seen in eyes’ corners or eyes’ shutting.

So there I was (still
walking, by reason of my bicycle
being broken – which is a long story)
Contemplating my bowl of jewels:
My turquoise, crystal, lapis, my kahurangi – all that,
And my pretty little sky shattered.

I was trudging through the green grass,
(and the essence of cow)
Crunching broken bits under foot (half
wishing I could pick them up because I
am poor) and I
Didn’t
Dare
Look up because what if I’d busted it
(irreparably) and
If the sky isn’t colours what is it?
What’s left?
When I raise my eyes, what will be seen?

And I hid under my cap (brown leather,
second-hand for two dollars) and just
Walked (one foot, then another) until I reached a
Construction
(roof, walls, garden, warmth, people)
Home,
Where I found, after all, that I had
(plus a gift from a cow)
This (but I’ll
leave the details to your imagination)
The sky is still blue
Sky is.

Don't think of this as a bodged poem. Think of it as the start of an interesting journey.

That's all.

Odling III: Reflections

I thought that I would have to write a reflection essay for the two odes that I had to write, and discovered later that I didn't. I still had at least half of it planned out, though, so I'm bally well writing it anyway. What follows is highly technical and the average reader may find it uninteresting, but the actual poem is very near the top and easy to find (it's in italics).

How It Started I was playing around with the Merry Sweary Lullaby, playing hooky basically, and considering how much fun it was to use words like vermillion, amber, and lapis lazuli in poems - not just for the vivid mental images they give to me, but their associations to far places and the wonderful sounds they make. I decided to write a poem about that.

If I want to write an object into a poem, I can do it in several ways. I can name it: a table. I can describe it by its attributes: brown, four legs, flat top, wooden, varnish-smelling, smooth. That often isn't enough, though, in which case I might describe it by its history: the side table my Dad found crusted in paint at a garage-sale and sanded and varnished until it was gleaming dark wood; or by what it is similar to, which is a whole world of description in itself and is one of the focii of metaphor and simile. I might personify it: O God of Tables, grace me with your stability. Finally, I might describe it by what it reminds me of, which is the other focus of metaphor, and really turns it into an attribute of something else. That's all right - poems are forgiving that way.

To use an abstract, like Colour, I had to use similar techniques. It is no longer possible to write a poem about "Colour - how wonderful you are," without getting lynched. I needed to link it to something more solid. I had initially played with ideas to do with the sky, and the fancier ways of saying "It's blue." This was the mental equivalent of stalking a twitchy little mouse's tail and jumping, all claws out, onto a ferocious Jubjub bird, but I'll get to the details later. My small subject turned into something with two radically different ideas as I thought about it, and trying to squeeze them into one poem was painful. Fortunately, I was supposed to write two: one Pindaric (that is to say, fulsome and over the top praise), and one Homeric (a quiet and wandering contemplation). Relieved, I put my first idea to the side and started writing a Pindaric Ode dedicated to the goddess of the rainbow, Iris, and her cloak, my personification of colours.

Colours I

Of the many-hued mantle of Iris I shall sing,
Her crystal cloak of light through rain, the bow
She bears, that bright-tined arrows arc and go
And graze our eyes, that every common thing
Is garbed and jewelled in glory, like a king.

And all the shades of darkness's sinister hiss,
Mixed with the sober weight of black, and brown,
And warming amber do adorn the gown
Of beauty, as a trilling silver kiss
Or scarlet, purple, glinting gold, and this

I ask of Iris, she whose plumes are light,
And Echo, lady of the unbodied sound -
Take all my naked thoughts, on paper bound
Entwined in tenuous lines of black and white.
Call music from them. Bring feathers for their flight.

To get some nuts and bolts out of the way, the poem is written in loose iambic pentameter. The looseness is mostly because, while a steady rhythm can be very beautiful, I didn't want to sacrifice that much meaning to a strait-jacket. There was a very serious word-choice in the very last line to break the rhythm, however, which I will discuss in more detail later. Originally, I was writing in tetrameter, four beats per line, which is what I usually fall into. Its nature is to have an enormous pause, or caesura in the middle of each line, and I decided that I didn't want that, also, I felt the need for more space between rhyme words so I experimented with pentameters. On reflection, pentameters are a very big change to English poetry: the Anglo-Saxons specialised in four stresses per line, with a weighty caesura. A pentameter has no natural gap: it trips along more smoothly. The rhyme scheme was abbaa because heroic couplets (aabb) and quatrains (usually abab) are boring but it's still nice to end a stanza on a couplet.

That first stanza I dedicated to as many different personifications, metaphors, and fancy ways of describing colours as I could. All in all, I had mantle/cloak/garb, crystal/jewel, the literal process of rain diffracting light, and the rainbow as a bow, casting arrows of colour into our eyes. The arrow metaphor comes from some old poems about Cupid, who is an archer that always aims for our eyes (when he isn't blind), and a half-remembered lecture on Greek scientists and their attempts at analysing sight. 'Common thing' and 'king' is an almost direct steal from an anonymous Elizabeth song: "A thing that stoops not to a king/ And yet is open to the common'st thing/ For she that is most fair/ Is open to the air." I liked the rhyme. I chose 'mantle' because it was a nice way of describing a rainbow covering the sky. Also, it seems to me that colours are essentially an outside attribute of an object - one that can never be removed, but still outside it. I dealt with that idea in the second poem, too, but here I was mostly encouraging the 'mantle' image as one of adornment - something that displays the value of an object. Jewels worked well with that idea, as well as being brightly coloured in their own right.

Stanza two ("And all the shades ...") was designed, simply and brutally, to show off the colours. I was working strongly with the phonetic qualities of the words. Specifically, I was using lots of sibilants (unvoiced fricatives) around "darkness" to match it with the words "sinister" and "hiss", because both of these qualities link strongly with my mental image of "darkness". I managed to evolve the sounds into nice solid stops (t, ck, b) for "weight", "black", and "brown" that warmed into lovely "amber", that I continued with a string of voiced stops (d, g) and nasals (n) in "do adorn the gown". (That was yummy.) "Trilling silver kiss" and so forth were chosen for a preponderance of "l" sounds and gaudiness. In addition, both scarlet and purple are colours associated with the old Roman emperors. As an aside,I had the phrases for "darkness" and "silver" floating in my head well before the rest of the poem hit paper. Also, this stanza was a rare opportunity to actually "show, not tell" what I was on about - in this case the sounds of the words. In many respects, this stanza is the core of the poem.

While I assembled that stanza for sounds, other stuff grew out of it. I had not precisely realised that I had a scale of very dark to very bright until I had almost finished the stanza. In addition one of my flatmates, when hearing it, thought that the stanza continued the sky motif of the first - depicting the darkness of a storm fading and being replaced with a gaudy rainbow. I didn't put it there, but I ain't turning it away, either :-D

The first two stanzas, while hammering out each line for them was difficult, are basically the same as when they started. The last stanza ("I ask of Iris ...") while it was first written in under an hour, went through two major rewrites over the course of a week before I was happy with it.

I did not know what it was about until I wrote it. I had originally planned it around the rhyme word "mask", which I thought went well with "mantle" and "cloak". However, while throwing out whatever images would fill in the gaps, I was struck quite strongly by two of them: all these mental colours coming from black and white lettering, and asking for feathers. I wanted feathers in the first place because they are colourful and the birds' clothing and because I associate a feathered cloak with the mantle of a rangatira - like an emperor's cloak. Also, they hooked in with the sky again. As I wrote them in, I realised that they are also essential flying equipment. The last three lines were originally:

These words in black and white, on paper bound
Bring feathers for their flight - I beg a task
That naked thought may dance in shining mask

It seemed to me that the poem was now pivoting around the dual denotations of "feathers". And this was good, but it left me with a superfluous last line, which was also very weak, that I couldn't just discard like you can in free verse. After a great deal of grumbling, I redrafted the whole thing, using different rhyme words, and again later to include "plumes of light" which I hope is a reasonably subtle way of foreshadowing the concept of feathers without giving the game away.

And why, you ask, was Echo in there at all? Well, as you'll recall, I wanted to celebrate the sounds of amber and vermillion, as well as their images. I went to great effort to celebrate this in the second stanza, and I wanted people to notice this. If they start wondering about Echo, they might take a closer look at the poem's aural elements (um, that sentence made sense before I wrote it). Also, I have a great love of a beautiful-sounding poem, and my request is very sincere.

Finally, what about the bloody caesura? Why did the silly girl use "music" in the last line, which leaves an extra unstressed syllable in the middle that disrupts the iambic pentameter when she could have easily used "songs" which is both more vivid and snappier?

The tea bowl that is too perfect loses its charm.

Ponder that, O my children, and have a nice cup of tea in it. We'll get to the second Ode later (cue evil laughter fading into the distance ...)

That's all for now.

This Means Nothing

The water is clear today.

I have walked dry-leaf concrete and shaded earth, heard the whirr of a kereru crashing loose branches and seen at every waterway, under the sparkle, the stream-rustle, the green swell of the Manawatu, the singular shape of each pebble.

**

For anybody reading this who isn't actually in New Zealand, a kereru is a kind of wood pigeon. It is green and white and flies like a pig. The Manawatu is a respectable river.

Common-Place Book

What do you usually do when you are shut up in a secret room, with no chance of getting out for hours? As for me, I always say poetry to myself. It is one of the uses of poetry - one says it to oneself in distressing circumstances of that kind, or when one has to wait at railway stations, or when one cannot get to sleep at night. You will find poetry most useful for this purpose. So learn plenty of it, and be sure it is the best kind, because this is most useful as well as most agreeable.

Nesbit, E. (1908, this ed. 1986) The house of Arden. England: Puffin Books

Healthy Eating III: Return of the Solanum Tuberosum

Ours is not a house that likes potatoes.

Individually, both of my flatmates and myself are all quite fond of them, whether as a simple baked potato snack, mashed with a little milk and garlic, boiled soft and mixed with an omelette, thrown into a stew for extra carbohydrate ...

Unfortunately, while we are fond of them, we never manage to eat them regularly. This means that half a bag of potatoes will generally be squirrelled away someplace where it will, to assert its vital nature, either turn green or try to send out shoots in a search for sustenance. In one instance, we were cooking roast chicken for a fancy dinner (guest included) and, an hour before it was ready, started looking for spuds to roast with it. You can't have a roast without potatoes. We dug up a plastic bag in which the essential roots had started putrefying. There was liquid in that bag. The smell, once disturbed, was remarkable, clinging to bowls and hands ... we had to wash everything three times before it went away and at that very time we received a phone call from our guest asking if she could come early to help? Her offer was politely declined.

I've also used the humble potato as a prop for a roleplaying game, where I traded the rare herb 'solanum tuberosum' to a little Fairy. Considering that it was set in Medieval Europe, it was very rare! I wish I could have seen her face, though, when she unwrapped it and found the tendrilly, damp, squidgy mess of what a potato becomes in our house ...

When I started writing this blog, I did a smidgen of research about the potato. It's been cultivated in South America for seven thousand years, and was first grown on the chilly, arid heights of the Andes, flourishing where other crops whimpered and fled. It didn't reach Europe until just after the Middle Ages, where it was somewhat distrusted by the populace. Why? Heh, read this:

The potato is a member of the nightshade family and its leaves are, indeed, poisonous. A potato left too long in the light will begin to turn green. The green skin contains a substance called solanine which can cause the potato to taste bitter and even cause illness in humans. Such drawbacks were understood in Europe, but the advantages, generally, were not.

They are very nutritious, and in time became a staple all over Europe. (Ireland came to depend on them, and in the Potato Famine its population halved, through starvation and emigration. That's a kick-arse little vegetable.

(from http://www.indepthinfo.com/potato/history.shtml)

The New Zealand sweet potato, kumara, is also reckoned to come from South America, and Thor Heyerdahl cited this in his theory that Maori and other Polynesians originated from that continent.

Interestingly, the kumara that we eat today aren't the historical variety, which were about the size of a finger. In the early 1850s, according to one source, a larger variety was imported, again from the Americas. Go figure.

(from http://www.kumara.co.nz/about.shtml)

But back to potatoes, the non-sweet variety. I tried, in the early days, to find a place to keep the potatoes where they wouldn't actually go soggy - in a cupboard, in the official vegetable rack (this is where they turn green and putrid), leaving them on the bench, but by now I make something of a point of only buying potatoes in very small quantities so that we can enjoy them without potato zombies spoiling (in) our day. However. I'd been wondering, for about a week, where that odd, earthy smell in the kitchen was coming from. Finally in the mood for housekeeping, I opened up the bottom cupboard and pulled out a few bags of sugar and rolled oats.

I found a plastic bag behind them.

From it, long blossoming tendrils groped out into the larger cupboard. When I peered inside the bag I realised that most of the potato lumps had gone spiky like hedgehogs as they, too, attempted escape. One had actually reduced itself to black earth, bravely sacrificing itself that the others might have the sustenance to grow and conquer our kitchen. I am really scared about what would have happened if they'd found the sugar.

Anyway, I thrust a stick in the bag and carried it, at arm-plus-stick-length, to our mulch pile, carefully cutting away the plastic from the necks of the conqueror spuds. Such fortitude deserved to live.

The story has a happy ending (for the potatoes, anyway).

Epilogue: I remember reading once about a person who discovered how wasps reproduce and, ever after, was afraid of eating eggs. After seeing the pseudopods of those spuds, I, well ...

This is not a house that likes potatoes.

Shorts

There is a class of word that, while it describes other things, includes itself in that description, thus both defining a meaning, and demonstrating it in a short space

sesquipedalian

is an example. It refers to very long words (lit. a-foot-and-a-half-long) and is itself at 14 letters trying to stretch into the forever, something that its synonym

inkhorn word

at 11 letters (if you include the full term) doesn't match. Similarly,

broaden

counts, because it is broader than broad, though

thinner

is no skinnier than its progenitor. My own small contributions to this list:

glo'al stop

replacing the [tt] with itself, and (my favourite)

innuendo

Odling II - Wood and Water

There is a proverb that I encountered a few years back - I couldn't tell you where it came from: "Before great deeds: chop wood, draw water. After great deeds: chop wood, draw water." It was explained to me at the time that it meant that every person, no matter how illustrious, is also very humble: the necessities of life cannot be ignored.

I have another interpretation. We'll get back to that.

Recently I finished an ode! Two of them! A set! I'm still wondering if they are a) too obvious, b) too obscure, c) far too tumpty tumpty or d) ugly, but never mind that. My point is that the act of poetic creation is for me one that is very similar to other creative activities, like writing a story or sewing. It goes through several stages. As I sit here of an evening, in singlet and pajama pants, with a soft red blanket and hair around my shoulders, let's see if I can quantify them:

1. Walking around letting Ideas flit past in a fog until one settles on my shoulder (or sometimes I catch 'em with a net to show the little blighters who's boss). There's often a bit of negotiation between me and the Idea at this point, as we decide if we can work together or whether we will have to come to an amicable agreement and see someones else.

2. Obssessive creation. Often there is a serious puzzle, a problem of bits that don't want to work together. I'd consider this frustrating but I've realised that I'm not actually happy unless I have something over which I can pull my hair out (figuratively) and stay up all night (literally). The really fun part is when the insoluble problem transforms into some bright and shining solution that I never expected, that is new. Sometimes my solutions fall apart, though, and I have to exercise patience - a great deal of it.

3. The thing considers itself whole. This is not a good time for me, because I'm tired and jangly and bouncing between euphoria (Isn't it wonderful? Come see!) and depression (Please, tell me it isn't as bad as I know it is ...). All in all, it ain't pleasant. It's the price I pay for the fun bits, though, so never mind.

4. The afterglow. I've had enough time to step back and look at it with a stranger's eyes. This is a bit like 2., but a lot less intense. I'll spend a couple of weeks tinkering with it - making very small changes to see if it hangs better that way. I'm in that stage with the Colours odes right now. I mean, I think I've got them sorted, but I thought that three days ago, too, and they haven't even been through the Workshop yet ...

And where do chopping wood and drawing water come into all this?

Well, in all of my neatly labelled stages, I find simple repetitive activities very comforting: things that keep hands and body occupied while my mind drifts or runs wailing. Walking is good, and so is washing dishes (which has the added advantage of a clean kitchen!). I wonder sometimes if that is what the proverb-maker had in mind: that after the storms of the great the motions that stitch small things back together are what we need.

No matter. As the teacher of my poetry class recently said, "It isn't what they put there, it's what you get out of it." That is a rather terrifying comment, actually, but I find it useful in this instance so we'll let it pass.

But pay it no mind. It is late, so late. My flatmates are snoring in their beds and so should I (er, in my bed, that is, not theirs (um, their separate beds, I mean, o never mind) ).

Sleep.

*
*
*

And mea culpa, lads and lasses: I've been lying to you. Some of the comments above would indicate that I wrote them late at night. Depending on when you read them, you could well have the illusion of listening to a story at the same time I tell it. Well ... most of it was written last night. The notion of chopping wood and drawing water, though, has been sitting on my shoulder for a while, and this blog was initially going to be purely about the things that I do of that nature, and which ones work better than others. I got bored writing that, though, and put it aside (1.) until last night when I had another go - another approach, I guess (2.). I managed to by-pass 3. (phew), but I prefer to let things sit for a bit and am now, this afternoon (and as I edit this, another evening), in 4. circling back to 2. On re-reading I realised that the first ending, while pretty, was something that I did not really believe. It was a lie. In releasing that lie, I have involved you, Dear Readers, in another. I'm not sorry.

And I think of the many texts I have loved for their 'spontaneity' and ease of reading, and wonder how much they were pruned, how many impurities filtered out. Where, then, is the uninterrupted growth of thought that I thought I had? This is better work: it is more deeply crafted. It recalls an earlier image, and re-uses it in an interesting way. Truly, you are better off with my deceit - do you forgive me?

Ah, even if you don't, I know what I'll be doing now - going back to chopping wood and pouring water.* No matter what I do with them, they are always themselves.

* Actually, I was cooking dinner and, as of this latest edit, planning on going to sleep - sneaky, sneaky Cat!

To the Gentlemen in the Audience

WARNING: While the following contains no violence, sex, or profanity, some readers may still find it objectionable. You were warned.

Y'know, I've worked out why all those sitcoms and movies with families in them always have a scene with a teenage girl locked in the bathroom, siege-engines, Swiss mercenaries, and tubs of boiling oil (leg-wax, possibly) all set to repel any intruders. She's "doing her hair," she says, or she's "got a hot date" and wants to get her make-up right. My favourite is leg-waxing, where the outer, non-privileged members of the household get to hear ripping sounds and agonised screams at the very same time. Fit payment, they think, for being unable to use the toilet ...

And sometimes this is indeed the case. Those clouds of fragrant steam may mask nothing more than hairgrips and mascara. Then again, sometimes that girl is talking in code. There's something going on in that bathroom that she really doesn't want to tell you and you really, really don't want to hear.

I'm still writing in code. Let me be more clear. "My period started today," this girl says, "and I don't feel good. I'm having a hot shower and I don't want to talk about it." Or possibly: "My period was unusually heavy today and halfway through it, in a small, crowded room, I discovered that a) I was on my last sanitary product, b) I couldn't get out of there for a good half hour, and c) that warm meaty smell was me. Hooray for emergency toilet paper I say."

She adds, grinning nastily, "I'm surfing the crimson tide." Eyes glazing over, you back away but she isn't done yet. A life-time of avoiding this subject has boiled over in her disgusted soul and she wants you to suffer for it. "The long dry desert days, the drought of life is over," she says, getting poetic, "The parched inhabitants have prayed to the sky and lo! it breaks and Great Red Rain, the deluge, the ocean-from-above waters the dusty lands." Now you're running but she follows, muttering of washing clothes and blood stains and sneaking around when nobody can see to get rid of the evidence. The filth, the disgust, the fear of discovery. She hasn't even started on cramps yet, or any of the other myriad little quirks of a woman's character at this time that somehow seem so funny when you aren't suffering them yourself.

A curse, they called it. I wonder why.

Now, O my children, forget all I have written. These things are better not thought of by mankind. Just, the next time some female in your household boots you out of the bathroom or shower or sanitary facility on some trifling excuse like "doing my hair and this is the best mirror," don't argue. Don't whine that you need to pee - that's what the bushes outside are for. Don't complain about frippery and the eternal preening of the female. If you do, she might tell you the real reason she's in there. You don't want that, do you?

Don't ask; don't tell.

POST SCRIPT: Uhm, I wanted a change from writing about poetry, okay?

A Little More Poetry

And I state again that it is more fun to write poetry when you're supposed to be doing something else. This is just a little one:

Image

I remember
Beating black wings in a building's corner,
Battering its self at glassed-in walls
The panic of that bird and I
For scooping and holding in hands, and fleeing

And I remember the softness
Of its feet on my fingers as
It stood there, briefly, and the shout
Of joy as it flew.

**

I also note that, even when I am indulging in the purest of Imagist free verse, I still alliterate. And pun (though only in the title). Okaaay ...

Odling I

I realised that I don't actually like putting my deepest feelings into poetry. My work is strong on rhyme and metre and word-play, on alliteration for its own sweet sake, on throwing a twiddle of nice-sounding words on paper and watching it grow into something beautiful and true. There are reasons why. The world is overfull of young, angsty poets who feel that feeling is first, that if they shout "I feel bad!" loud enough we will feel it with them, of postmodern pissheads who revel in ugly, wandering, discursive dribble.

If you can get your form right then the function hits so much harder. If your poem is nice to say, then people are more likely to memorise it and teach it to their children: it is more likely to be remembered after you are not. I decided several years ago that I needed to master the tools of the trade, as a carpenter learns by making oggle-boxes and bird-houses.

And I realised that I tend to place these tools between the poem and myself. Much of the poetry that I have written lately has been incidental verse. That is to say, I am writing a story and there is a need for a poem, or there is a tiny crack that I can wedge and hammer open until there is space for a little word-singing. In either case, both the form and function of the poem are dictated by the circumstances of the story: someone mentioned a ruined city - throw in a scrap of lament; a hobbit composed a saga about Bandobras Bullroarer - give it a good rhythmic feel and make it a touch over the top; a love poem written by a very selfish person - no problem!

I enjoyed writing all three of those verses very, very much. They have a beauty in their own right. Yet, there is a veil between me and them. The stories themselves, my prose-writing, has a similar quality. I do not like writing torture-scenes. The love or pain of characters is not revealed by speech or drama, but by the graceful gesture, the flick of the eye, the stuttering tongue.

There are reasons for that, too. I enjoy subtlety and riddles in my prose: the conclusion that a reader works for is so much stronger than an easy answer. If I want to induce emotion in my readers, then there are some very cold-blooded and manipulative techniques to use. If I sketch my cartoons well then the reader will paint the minute, colourful details for me, which is a great saving in word-space and makes it more personal to the audience as well. There are good, sound, craft-wise reasons to write that way. But it also has the effect of separating me off from the opaque, elusive worlds I write.

I'm just wondering, why do I have so much trouble writing: "I feel bad"?

(Er, in general, that is. I was having a really interesting and good day when I wrote the above, it's just that part of that day was reflecting on these issues ;-). Now, today, when I post this, is getting to be somewhat gruelling, but never mind. I'll live. Stiff-upper-lip time, ne? Honestly, I don't feel bad - just a little harried.)

More Healthy Eating

So, I've got a few friends and acquaintances of Chinese extraction, and the other day one gave me some food.

It looked like a bit of something hard, about the size of my hands clasping each other, wrapped with large bamboo leaves tied with string. I don't remember what my friend called it, but she told me that it had been pre-cooked and that I was to boil it for fifteen minutes to soften it again.

I hied me home, and put my saucepan (with water) on to boil, tucked my bamboo-wrapped parcel in it, and let heat and moisture Do Their Thing.

A quarter hour later, I had this wonderful green smell coming up from the pot and green colour coming out into the water, and a few nicks in the bamboo where grains of rice were peeping out.

On dissection, there was a great mass of rice, beans, chewy brown mushrooms (Yes, Steph, mushrooms) and hard-boiled egg yolk. It was slightly gluey, and slightly sweet, with lots of interesting flavours coming out.

Very tasty.

Thank you.

That's all.

Healthy Eating, Clean Liver

I've been very tired, lately.

The really good thing to do here, as well as sleep and more fruit and veg, is to eat liver. It's got all sorts of good things in it and I always feel better after getting it down. There are two main problems for me with eating liver, though. The first is that I don't actually enjoy the process: it has an odd, grainy texture, and it tastes funny, and as a child I was trained to avoid offal. The second is that I'm not sure which restaurants in my home city will actually cook and sell the stuff.

The solution is obvious: cook it myself. So, laden with a dollar-fifty slice of the internal organ of an ox, an eight-fifty packet of bacon, and some mushrooms, I hied me home to have a go, with the aid of The Joy of Cooking (1975, 13th Ed.), a tome of approximately the same size and fascination as Brewer's.

There are some general rules for any new recipe:
- Clean up the kitchen as you go.
- Throw enough onions, garlic, potato, and beef-stock in and almost anything will taste okay.
- Follow the recipe as closely as you can in quantities and ingredients.
I had problems with the last - I howled when I realised that there was only one small onion left to dice and, no matter how hard I looked, I didn't actually have half a cup of bacon lard to cook with, alas. I made do with slices of bacon, trimmed of the fat, and cooking oil.

Now, the cool thing about The Joy of Cooking is that it doesn't just give a recipe, it has instructions on different kinds of foods and the special things that you should do with them. For example, I found out that I should wipe my liver with a damp cloth, peel off the grey membrane that ran around my slice like a cheese-rind, and soak it in milk for several hours. This last was discovered at six in the evening and meant that I started my serious cooking at nine.

At that point, I was reading all about 'dredging' the meat with Seasoned Flour - you throw flour, paprika, nutmeg, salt, pepper and the sliced meat into a plastic baggy, hang tight to the neck of the bag, and shake the whole thing liberally. The Joy of Cooking has two ribbon bookmarks, by the way, which were very useful at this point, what with turning back and forth for instructions.

Then I was 'braising' my liver, which means browning it in a pan and then adding hot beef-stock and the other ingredients to half boil and half fry for a quarter hour. My final result involved ox-liver, bacon, onion, garlic, potato, beef-stock, chicken-stock, and a bit of white wine that a long-vanished dinner guest brought in. I'd forgotten the mushrooms.

Now, my flatmate Michael (David was out) had politely but very, very firmly declined to partake of my repast. I'd tried to keep him involved in the experience by describing the membrane peeling, and the washing off of the blood, and the mysterious holes in the meat that I really hoped were left by arteries, but he wasn't having any. This meant that I ended with a bowlful of browny-greyey-blacky things that somehow smelt delicious, and only me to eat it. It was very good - the sauce and other bits were flavourful, the taste and texture of the liver not too intrusive. I went to bed with a comfortable, warm weight in my tummy and, while I still didn't sleep well, I didn't wake up still exhausted either. I had the rest for lunch today, with butter-fried mushrooms added in, and it was very tasty then, too.

I'm glad I went through the whole thing.

Now, The Joy of Cooking also has recipes for Brains (p. 504). Ha ha! Night of the Living Cook, coming soon ...

Why My Flatmate Is Not A Monotheist

It’s the tale of the Watchmaker.

Have you heard it before? If you are walking in the desert and you see an old silver pocket watch, and examine it, you will see, amidst the sand, worked silver, and cunning gears, and a face of enamel and glass and gilt lettering. Would you think that it had evolved there, or was it made by a Watchmaker?

This story is used sometimes to illustrate Intelligent Design, the theory that the universe and its inhabitants are far too complicated to have come about through chance or even Natural Selection. This is a Christian story, as I have heard it, and implies the existence of God.

My flatmate, David Schwartz, chooses to extend the metaphor a wee bit further. The Watchmaker, he says, did not mine that silver. He did not alloy it, and probably did not create the glass covering the dial. The design is adapted from those watches that have been created before it, both by the Watchmaker and other Craftsmen. Indeed, the pattern of two sets of twelve hours, of sixty minutes to that hour and sixty seconds to that minute, the pattern of the numerals, Arabic or Roman, even the lettering of the Watchmaker’s name to sign the work, it descends from the work of others, through the passing of time and linguistic drift, to the first Sumerian Scribe that dabbed a wedge-shaped stick in clay to show an Ox.

A watch does not imply one Watchmaker: it implies a great deal more. Polytheism, anyone?

David tells me that he is a Sapientist, although I am not sure what he means by that.

Here endeth the lesson.

Thank you for letting me post this, Dave.

And Now For A Little Poetry

What follows is either kinda cool or ghastly beyond belief. I leave you, kind readers, to judge:

The Merry Sweary Lullaby

Now is the time when evening falls,
From darkness hear the sleepy calls
Of ducks, and drowsy geese, and swans
All sitting by their shadowy ponds
With you I sit, with all my cares,
I’m singing a song for younger ears
Go to sleep, my little lamb
For you, dear love, I’d give a

Deal of damask, of brocade embroidered
With Damascus roses and crocuses, bordered
By poppies, for sleeping, I’d give you vermillion
Velvet, and quilts full of eider-down pillowing
Sleepy heads, sleepy, now lay down to nap,
O Pearl of the Evening, think of a

Crayfish crouching in clear water
Dreaming of the Sea-King’s daughter
Catching locks of her sea-green hair and
Winding them in its pincers there, she
Little grudges claw-hand weaving, for
Soaring to surface, she believing
Clouds are pillows, downy, white,
There she’ll sleep, you little

Should in the time of the passing moon
Run skipping in hallways or howl like a loon
She misses you, kisses you, blinks a sad eye,
She dances alone in the slumbering sky
But leave her, and grieve her – O! let her feel Loss!
Tell her, my dear, that you don’t give a

Tingle, a tangle, a blackberry bramble
A bright side, a right side, a snow-feather-light side
A creep, or a leap, or a river-willow-weep
Or Tongue for keeping, or Nose for seeping,
Or Mouth for cheeping, or Eye for peeping
With all my speaking -
You are sleeping.

Would you read it to a small child?

Technical Stuff:

1. Don’t ask me where I got the idea from, because I don’t actually remember. However, I had three audiences in mind when I wrote this: small children, who enjoy rhythmic, beautiful language and nice images; their parents, who love them and spend hours lulling them to sleep; and their parents, who have spent hours lulling them to sleep, and could do with a little quiet venting.

2. The first stanza is actually the last to be written. However, all my attempts to fit a verse to the first anti-couplet that I came up with were too twee and revolting, so I started writing at the couplet.

3. And that couplet didn’t even make it into the final version! It started “Go to sleep my little duck”. However, I didn’t like some of the subtexts, so changed it to “Go to sleep my little lamb” at the suggestion of Alan G (Thanks, Alan!).

4. This was an interesting lesson in prosody (the rhythms of the words). That first couplet was very trochaic (/ U / U / U) but the stanza that followed wanted to trip along in dactyls (/ U U / U U) – or anapasts, if you prefer (U U / U U /). I decided to capitalise on this change in rhythm, and wrote the crayfish stanza in heavy trochaic tetrameter (four feet/stresses per line). It originally went:

Crayfish crouching in clear water
Dreaming of the Sea-King’s daughter
Catching locks of sea-green hair
Winds them in its pincers there, she
Little grudges it the weaving,
Soars to surface, she believing
Clouds are pillows, fluffy, white, so
There she’ll sleep…

I was aiming for a contrast between the heavy ‘two’ rhythm and the light ‘three’ rhythm. Then my last stanza wouldn’t stay out of ‘three’ and, looking at, the change in rhythm was too heavy. I spent a bit of time converting the crayfish into absolutely perfect dactylic tetrameter, which I won’t quote because as verse it is inferior to both the original and the final versions.

My point is, that I looked at a poem in an absolutely consistent metre, and it was tumpty-tumpty beyond belief! I ended up aiming for a compromise, tucking a few unstressed syllables into the crayfish to ease the transition. I like it a lot better this way. (If it makes any confused readers feel better, I had to look up the technical terms for trochee and dactyl before I wrote the above.)

5. I’ve just finished writing the poem, and I am still in its event shadow, to use an analogy. I’ll probably look at it in a couple of days, when I have my breath back and can get some perspective, and make a few changes. Your comments and suggestions are welcome.

What to Write, What to Say

I am faced with a problem in my poetry class. I have to write a poem, an Ode to be specific. I am having difficulty with this.

It is not that I can't come up with ideas for such, including Pirates, Rivers, Thunder, the Sky, and the Mighty Contradiction, but each time I start to write all I can hear is other poets speaking their poems in my head. It's good poetry, or at least memorable poetry, but difficult to put in my own work. Ah, the words of the immortal bard:

Plagiarise!
Let no other's work evade your eyes!
Don't forget why the Good Lord made your eyes
So don't shade your eyes
But Plagiarise, Plagiarise, Plagiarise -
But remember always to be calling it 'Research'

Poets call it 'Allusions', but I don't want to. Um. Meanwhile, my ivory skull is ricocheting with:

I must go down to the Sea again, to the lonely sea and the sky
O Wild West Wind, O breath of Autumn's being
Jenny kissed me when we met
Abou ben Adhem, may his tribe increase
When night haunts you (okay, that's one of mine)
Tristram in Careol sleeps with a broken sword

All in all, I could do with a bit of peace and quiet, sigh.

Which leads, in a corkscrew way, to the other thing I wanted to write about here. Fairy tales and myths often have a situation where a person is sworn to keep a secret yet has to let it out, so shouts it down a hole, or tells it to an iron oven, or whispers to the reeds "Midas has ass's ears!" Sitting here at a peaceful, quiet computer monitor, it feels that I am alone and private. Yet I am shouting to the Void!

I'll try not to let out anything too personal.

May the Void answer back as it wills.

Good Evening

I find, having gone through all that is required to create a blog, that in my first post I am struck with the writer's equivalent of stage-fright.

What do I say? What do I write? Maybe you won't like me - dither, dither ... I'd rather be in Scotland fishing!

To ease the stress on my poor jangled nerves, and because where I live the winter has begun to ease, I shall quote something I wrote almost precisely a year ago:

Signs of Spring

The leaves are coming out
I'm very happy to meet you!

I extend the sentiment to you, O Esteemed Reader, and trust that we shall meet again soon.

Good night.