Poetry

A Window into Poetry

The photo below is of my first childhood house at Waterview, via South Grafton. It was taken several decades after my time spent there within the bosom of my first family. I think it is the inspiration for the poem, below, which is probably my best. childhood-house-photo-2006

Poetry is not my most practised genre, but I have been told that my prose writing is poetic and rhythmical. Like many writers, I lack confidence in my ability to create successful poems. For this reason, this post will be followed by recent research exploring poetry I carried out online: what it means to many others like me, struggling to understand and/or to produce it.

February 20, 2017 4 comments

Poetry Writing

Prufrock: Part 2

The negative urban images in the poem are juxtaposed with many very pleasant images. Some of these are the beautiful women and art in salons, and the mermaids frolicking in the sea at the end. This “feminine imagery” stays with me, rather than the negative ones of growing old, smoky streets, and lonely men. That is partly because of the rhythm and the sound of the words as they slip off the tongue, sublimating the ugliness inherent in some of the lines.

mas-teacup-by-kate

Shall I say, I have gone at dusk through narrow streets
And watched the smoke that rises from the pipes
Of lonely men in shirt-sleeves, leaning out of windows? …

I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas.

November 28, 2016 0 comment

Poetry Writing

Prufrock: Part I

The Image below is of a photo I took outside Il Palazzetto Bar near the Spanish Steps in Rome in 2012. It suggests obliquely for me the unexpressed sentiments in the poem of loss, love, and melancholy related to growing old. Eliot was reading Dante Alighieri’s main works when he wrote this poem. The photo at the bottom of this post is of a statue I came across on a street corner, during my first visit to the Eternal City in 2009.

palazzo.roma.

The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock

Let us go then, you and I,
When the evening is spread out against the sky
Like a patient etherized upon a table;

November 24, 2016 0 comment

Poetry Writing

The Voice of T.S. Eliot

Eliot’s poem, “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock“, and especially the second and third lines, are said to herald in modernism in poetry. His is an excellent example of a unique voice. The voice reverberates from the words, almost jumping out of the page. It resonates for the reader, reaching out to decode the metaphorical content.

T.S. Eliot wrote this poem in 1910 when he was twenty-two years old. It was first published in 1915 at the instigation of Ezra Pound.

November 10, 2016 2 comments

Nature Poetry

Visiting Ein Gedi

I was drawn to the exotic name Ein Gedi, when coming across it in my brother’s first novel set partly in Israel. Then in a friend’s writing based on a poem by Ted Hughes from “Folktale”, part of Hughes’ collection entitled Capriccio. Hughes refers obliquely to the last of the leopards of Ein Gedi in the following excerpt, which suggests via exotic imagery that he is enslaved by dangerous passions. Hughes is writing here about his fraught relationship with Assia Wevill, a flamboyant European who settled in Israel for a time after the War.

What he wanted
Was the gold, black-lettered pelt
Of the leopard of Ein Gedi.
She wanted only the runaway slave.
(From Folktale by Ted Hughes)

There are still doubts as to whether any of the leopards from the original aristocratic dynasty of leopards that roamed the area still exist. And even whether any leopards at all still roam the wilderness areas of Ein Gedi. I discovered that Hariton the leopard entered kibbutz Ein Gedi twice in earlier years, and was once spotted carrying off in his fangs a house cat, which he later devoured. Apparently at this time there were two leopards left in the Judea Desert, Hariton and a female.

According to a study from Tel Aviv University, altogether there were only eight leopards left in the entire country up until a few years ago. The study, conducted by Inbar Perez in 2006 as part of her degree in zoology, was intended to provide the Nature and Parks Authority with information to help preserve the leopards, which have been in danger of extinction for years. Fewer than 100 leopards are estimated to be left in the Arabian Peninsula (Yemen, Saudi Arabia and Oman) and in the rest of the region, including Israel, fewer than 50.

Ein Gedi is an oasis on the western shore of the Dead Sea and one of the most important archaeological sites in the Judean Desert.

The name means Kid Spring: a compound of two Hebrew words: ein meaning spring, and gdi meaning young goat. Ein-Gedi is actually the name of a spring which flows from a height of 656 feet above the Dead Sea. In the Bible, the wasteland near the spring where David sought refuge from Saul is called “the wilderness of Ein-Gedi” and the enclosed camps at the top of the mountains, the “strongholds of Ein Gedi.” Ein Gedi is mentioned for the first time in the Old Testament (Joshua 15, 61) among the list of the six desert-cities in the domain of the tribe of Judas (Yehudah). Wikipedia