ten or eleven chance meetings ...

 

TEN OR ELEVEN CHANCE MEETINGS WITH POETIC MINDS AND POETIC POSSIBILITIES

ONE … aged nineteen, finding a volume of Eliot’s FOUR QUARTETS sprawling, although happily  undamaged, on the rubble of a half-demolished college library.  You can’t argue with his first lines, which I read there and then …

 

Time present and time past

Are both perhaps present in time future,

And time future contained in time past.

If all time is eternally present

All time is unredeemable.

TWO … as a child, having been the very last of my class to learn reading … one lad never did … studying a rhyming epitaph in the churchyard at Malmesbury … Hannah Twynnoy, “In Bloom of Life, She's snatched from hence” in 1703.

THREE … in infancy, hearing over the radio a traditional nursery rhyme set to music … “Boys and Girls, Come out to play, The Moon is shining bright as day” … and instantly being able to visualize the scene in much more detail than the rhyme itself had offered.

FOUR … in the house where the painter TITIAN was born, loitering a short while and listening with enormous surprise to a young RED-HEADED woman talking to her three small RED-HEADED children, in IRISH GAELIC, her own voice clear as a small bell, in phrases that almost always ended on higher notes.

FIVE … Aged fourteen, sitting ten feet from the stage in a school hall & being quite shocked by the melodic fluency of a fourteen year old actress enacting Jessica’s few lines from Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice … and to make things “worse”, she already had a come-and-get-me body, and huge come-and-get-me eyes.

SIX … on a morning when Venice stood still, the whole city shivering in a freezing fog, wandering in to the huge interior of the Basilica of San Giovanni and San Paolo, hoping to be impressed by some tombs … a long way from the door, a priest was singing in a strong but unforced tenor … I wasn’t really listening because I don’t understand Italian or Latin … but gradually the voice accumulated more expressive phrasings until it’s beauty overtook and then mesmerised me and I was compelled to listen to every note … it was a funeral mass echoing amongst the tombs … I hadn’t realized that Latin could be so eloquently musical … afterwards, they carried the coffin to a magnificent launch, all black lacquer and chrome, and it glided away from the Campo beneath a low brick foot bridge, the Ponte Cavallo … the shadow of someone’s life propelled by that warm voice quickly dissolving into the icy gloom.

SEVEN … there is a musical, filmed in France, called LES DEMOISELLES DE ROCHEFORT … lots of singing and dancing, with a dialogue in modern French ( as spoken in the 1960s ) … in the middle of the film, a small group of local people and some handsome strangers sit down to an after-hours dinner party, guests of the owner, in an ultra-modern café … all plate glass and chrome … suddenly, you realize that they are speaking in an archaic style, their dialogue compressed into a seventeenth century rhyming format the French called ALEXANDRINES … but just as your ear grasps that change, so the spell breaks and they revert to spoken dialogue again.

EIGHT … an elderly man with a rucksack used to show up in our local pub when he came in from his village to collect his pension, and then had to wait a while for a bus to get him home again … he was very softly spoken and had an enquiring mind … once, our conversation turned to poetry and we discussed the problem of form, because I was ignorant of all the possible conventional and traditional ways to construct lines and verses, and had given up the struggle to finish a poem of my own … he pointed out that passion was infinitely more valuable than form, and urged me to study the poetry of LORCA, and to read the translations of the ancient Welsh romances, known as the MABINOGION … years later I found an excellent translation of Lorca’s essay on the subject of DUENDE … and decades after that I found MATTHEW FRANCIS’ magical re-writing of THE MABINOGI, which my old friend never lived to enjoy  … I am eternally grateful for his advice, given more than forty years ago.

 

NINE … that poem I struggled to write, which the man in the pub politely dissected, stayed with me, unresolved … fifteen years later, living a hundred miles away, I was scavenging offcuts from a furniture factory and I was pondering how I might use a dozen curved skirting boards for a painting, then suddenly realising I had enough rows to paint my poem … and even though the lettering is clumsy, I still have it thirty years on … it is about six foot high and over four feet wide, and will soon become too heavy for me to lift i wonder who might have to dispose of it ?

TEN … a woman from Ireland charmed me deeply …  she suffered from insomnia … I fetched and read Keats’ sonnet O SOFT EMBALMER for her … and often wonder if she eventually found a man she might sleep deep with.  Her soul was as deep as it was wide.  He would be a lucky man.

 

ELEVEN … Years & years ago, I wandered into a sunlit library on a day when my heart was filled with the customary gloom that follows rejection by yet another fine woman … someone had left the Times Literary Supplement open on a table and at the bottom of the page was THE TENTH MUSE, a short poem by SYLVIA KANTARIS … I laughed out loud, even though I didn’t yet know that the Greek Gods lived in the company of NINE muses … and many years later my interest in the Muses was re-kindled and then, learning a little more about them, was able to make a small painting about their encounter with the nine brash and uncultured and impertinent princesses who deservedly became the PIERIDES.