What is this great horror?
I pad around it silently,
Catfelt in the dark.
It is not nervous.
Nor am I.
But it sits.
And I pace.
And that’s the way things are.
For now.
Tia Azulay 06Mar07
Copyright © 2007 Tia Azulay
I’ve been thinking a lot over this weekend about goals (or, more specifically, about my lack of clearly described, time-limited, achievable goals). I have wanted so many things over my life time, and many of those desires still remain, and yet it seems that I settle so easily for less than fulfilment, or for situations that are almost guaranteed to prevent fulfilment.
This morning I’m wondering about the (as yet unfulfilled) passion that I see in another childhood poem of mine, The Ageless Call (see below), which I wrote when I was thirteen. It speaks of my desire to go to Scotland, a land I knew only through my imagination and the very many Scottish activities I was exposed to in South Africa. Blood-wise, Scotland has no greater claim on me than the other strands of my origins, which include Irish, English, Lithuanian Jewish and others not explored. However, my parents met at Scottish Country Dancing in Johannesburg. My father used to teach (he developed several innovative new dances of his own), and had also done a bit of Highland Dancing while younger. As a family, we went often to weekly dance sessions and dancing holidays (although my brothers felt this was distinctly uncool and were rather reluctant participants). While at high school, I danced in competitions and demonstrations for a Scottish Country Dance group. I had also taken up Highland Dancing very young and competed in Highland Gatherings several times over the years. Although I did receive medals for exams and competitions, I never developed the dedication of two of my cousins who were South African champion dancers.
I also started bagpiping (to the consternation of almost everyone at the very prim girls’ boarding school I attended, and the fascinated incomprehension of the boys’ pipe band whose Band Master reluctantly allowed me to practise—but not to march officially—with them). After high school, I spent a brief period with the Transvaal Irish Regiment, but I was very naive and found it a bit rough being not only a teenager amongst adults, but the only female in a very masculine environment again, and this one much more macho. My enthusiasm also cooled fairly sharply as I began to realise the hours of commitment in practice and performance time needed to maintain the required standard and attend all the official functions. I left shortly after being measured for my kilt! However, my love of the pipes remained.
When my father died, I arranged for a piper to play at his funeral. It was a very appropriate send-off, but intensely emotional for almost everyone there because it brought him to mind so strongly. After his death, the Jewish side of my identity gradually took more and more focus. Eventually I emigrated to Israel, but I kept my practice chanter (I still have it) and took it with me on all my travels. When I eventually moved to the UK, I craved a reconnection to aspects of my culture that had been completely absent from my life for four years. One of the first things I did was to find a bagpipe teacher here. However, I stopped within a few months because work pressure made it difficult to find time for the necessary practice and I felt ashamed and undeserving before my very brilliant teacher. I also couldn’t fathom what I would do with my reinvigorated skill—an apartment in London is not exactly the best place for chuffing away on the bagpipes, and the practice chanter is a less-than-thrilling substitute. Also, my ever-patient husband, who is willing to give most things a go at least once, found it hard to work up any enthusiasm! I suppose it’s a lot to ask of anyone, but especially of an Israeli sabra with absolutely no exposure at all to any culture from the British Isles. At least he’s learned to love some Irish drinking songs…!
Nowadays, there’s not much Scottish in my life at all. I’ve only been to Scotland once, a few years ago. I did love it, but it was only for a few days. I wonder how to make sense of all the passion and all the experience over the years that seems to have come to nothing. My dad’s mom was Scottish and his dad Jewish, so in a way I suppose I explored my relationship with him via the former while he was alive and the latter after he died, but neither exploration yet feels complete.
The Ageless Call
The pipes, the pipes are calling me
To come to the highlands wild and free.
The swishing kilt, the marching feet,
Echo the time of the drummer’s beat.
The thrilling notes of victory
Running in my blood are part of me.
The glorious, triumphant battle cry
Lingers in the air from days gone by.
Oh, misty mountains of my Scotland,
Live forever against the bitter wind!
Wrapped in memories, your majesty
Reminds your folk of a proud country.
I want to dance the victory dance
Of the ancient Scots, in warrior stance.
If only I could return to the land
Where my heart beats to a Scottish band.
Great Scotland I have never seen;
To my own land I have never been.
Yet my spirit the distance spanned,
Linking me to my heather-clad land.
Born and bred in a southern place,
Scottish Jew with an Irish face:
A varied ancestry in all,
But the strongest cry is the piper’s call:
“Land of my high endeavour,
Land of the shining river,
Land of my heart forever,
Scotland the Brave!”
Tia Azulay (Caron Burman) 28Mar78-05Mar07
Copright © 1978, 2007 Tia Azulay
panther in my living room
inside:
coiled energy hiding,
elastic power biding
lithe in silent limbs,
waiting for release;
outside:
luxuriantly stretching,
claws briefly etching
love or simply whims,
revelling in caprice;
sometimes:
kittensoft, purrplaying, strokesensing, growlgrowing;
always:
slinking toward synthesis, self-aware, knowing.
Tia Azulay 07Nov89-04Mar07
Copyright © 1989, 2007 Tia Azulay
Today I came across an interesting article called Mathematics in Poetry by JoAnne Growney. It’s aimed at people interested in maths, of course. I’m one who protests an interest in maths, but in whom maths is not interested, having given up on me a long time ago. Therefore, although I’m drawn to it, I lack some of the necessary vocabulary to make the best sense of some of the quoted poems. However, I remember enough from high school to recognise the cleverness and humour of some of them.
I recall being enthralled at school by Donne’s compass conceit in “A Valediction: forbidding mourning”. On reading it, I picked up the coldly functional and somewhat dangerous geometry instrument that lay inert in my pencil box and suddenly felt connected to this poet of another era. I imagined him sitting at his own desk, picking up his compass to create a circle as part of some practical or conceptual investigation and then becoming momentarily fascinated and distracted by the smooth ease with which he created a perfect circle. Perhaps he repeated the movement several times, warming the compass with his hands as he did so. Perhaps he entered a slightly altered state as he contemplated the startling perfection of its creation on the page, suddenly aware of the supernatural certainty that it gave the human hand. Did he also think about how the best circle comes with the lightest touch, and how hard it is to draw anything other than a circle with a compass—how one must bear down on the pencil tip and tear the page in order to vary the line? How this is so contrary to the nature of the thing that one desists in shame after the first attempt to break free? I’m not a mathematician, but there were aspects of this conceit that I could relate to, and which were enough to make me look up implications or inferences that I didn’t know as I sought a richer experience of the poem.
These musings took me back to my discussion of the use of vocabulary in my poem “On deciding not to marry a priest“. In response to a frustrated question about its perceived difficulty, I defended my use of a style, register, vocabulary, etc. that seemed appropriate to the content and the context of this poem. Admittedly, the context is only available to the reader by inference from clues in the title and the content, and these will be more easily read by people familiar with that context (and there are, believe it or not, many such), but I think there’s enough there for comprehension by anyone prepared to spend more than five minutes reading it.
The point is that I think it’s quite legitimate to write poetry that requires specialised knowledge for a full understanding of it. I’m quite irritated by the constant demand for accessibility requiring the exclusive use of an ill-defined “contemporary” vocabulary and forms. It seems to be driven by a requirement to communicate with a, by necessity, lowest common denominator-type audience who are not expected to put any effort into their part of the writer-reader contract. I believe that a writer has a responsibility to put an internally consistent piece before her readers. However, as a reader, I must recognise that each poem has its own language (in the broadest sense of that term). I need to be open to the potential beauty of any poem I encounter. Then, without resentment, I can seek to fill any gaps in my fluency in the poem’s language in order to plumb its depths. Of course, I won’t bother if there’s nothing in it to attract me initially, but if I scent beauty in it, I won’t petulantly demand to be spoonfed every puréed morsel so that I can make my date with the TV on time.
Tia Azulay 03Mar07
Copyright © 2007 Tia Azulay
I’ve a bee in my brain this morning, buzzing about “interactive poetry”. I looked and found several interesting and several, er… interesting ideas.
One of them was this site that provides the line and grammatical structures of simple poems, with blank fields to be filled in with appropriate words by the user. Some of the poems created via these “poetry forms” teaching tools are, well, just atrocious. On the other hand, I can see that it could be an enabling step…
Just for the fun (or the hell) of it, check it out at: Educational Technology Training Centre
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My Ball-and-Chain
I swung it daily,
You, sipping,
Tia Azulay 1993-01Mar07 |
Last night I was browsing through some of my thought-blurts and almost-poems and found this picture-poem combination. I recalled that I had been in a workshop where I made the picture first in response to some classical music (unfortunately, I forget which now) and then the poem in response to the picture. One of the things I couldn’t decide was which way up I preferred the picture, so that’s part of the theme!
One day this may become a standalone poem, but it needs further development. There’s just something about it that I like… I hope there’s enough here to catch your imagination too.
Leadership
Am I emergent or exhumed,
Birthed or rebirthed,
Now dangling below,
Now arched above
Damocles’ sword?
With hair root-startled
And sucked-in stomach,
Breath whisked away
By words yet unformed,
Briefly balanced,
But naked,
In thought’s blue waters,
Is it with rhythm and poise
Or by sweet accident
That I somersault
(am catapulted)
over today’s death?
Do I swim under that sword,
Or is it beneath me?
Is this my dagger that I see before me?
No matter.
Tomorrow, a thousand deaths await me.
Tia Azulay 14Jun03-28Feb07
Copyright © 2003, 2007 Tia Azulay
Oh, grey stone steps! My steps are grey;
They heave like schoolboys from their play
When duty, duty, duty, calls
To “brighten lives” in Hades’ halls.
Their lino path invades my shoes;
Its disinfectants now suffuse
My squeamish toes, but measured pace
Seeks out the chair. The audience waits.
A faded circle: knitting, shawls
And blankets shuffle—time now crawls
And settles into atrophy
As, shallow-breathed, I sound a key.
This note-struck hour now adds itself
To sighing streams of time which swell
Past bleary eyes that bloat with tears
And shout at slowly shutting ears.
Stripped to the lip-read sound of noise,
This young and strong and destined voice
Must gentle now to songs of yore
That echo down love’s corridor.
Must stroke and soothe and smile—but, Stop!
What floating muse impels her up?
Urgent, she battles Wheelchair’s clutch:
Rises, surprises me with touch!
Recalling love, her arms wrap round
This startled beau. Thumbs tap: she sounds
The years on me, lifts chin and heart
And cocks her arms for Charleston start!
Tia Azulay Feb94-27Feb07
Copyright © 1994, 2007 Tia Azulay
For Alan Glass
And some days, one feels like this… as is the case with most of the poems on this site so far, I wrote this a long time ago, but it’s probably one to which many people can relate:
Thanks for the lesson
So you’re a lover, are you?
I can do that too:
I can lurve and leave you;
even I can screw
my head down tight and nasty,
move like a machine,
drive a forklift through the party,
decimate the dream
come true;
come, I can,
come through,
come, come,
can you?
Tia Azulay 23Feb94-27Feb07
Copyright © 1994, 2007 Tia Azulay
The Ode on Melancholy urges me not to stop on the “obvious” expressions of Melancholy in my search for poetic feeling as this leads to a static non-productive depression, like artificially-induced altered states that purport to intensify experience but in fact deaden it. It urges me to yield to the exquisite apperception of true emotion that occurs when I am truly present to life and enter fully into its pleasures. A wholehearted contemplation of beauty must bring awareness of its transience. Ultimately, my pleasure in it is heightened precisely because of its transience. Human life is a bittersweet paradox of continual reaching for beauties which begin to dissipate almost in the moment of their flowering. The soul alert to this can truly feel.
Today, while researching it on the web, I was surprised to discover a discussion I hadn’t come across before (by marilee at englishhistory.net) of a preceding stanza that was removed before the Ode was published. It seemed at first a little impenetrable, but I realised that this was partly because I am so familiar with the other three stanzas. On rereading it, I was drawn in, especially by the idea that a poet might try to “stitch creeds together for a sail” — see my two previous posts!
Although I do think (as Keats and his publishers evidently did) that the poem as it is widely known can stand on its own, the possible prior stanza does convey the urgency that might drive the seeker to contemplate the extreme (suicidal) options covered in the stanza beginning “No, no…”. He really, really wants “To find the Melancholy”!
So… here it is, with four stanzas instead of the usual three.
Reading this poem slowly, aloud, is an incredibly rewarding experience. Enjoy!
Though you should build a bark of dead men’s bones,
And rear a phantom gibbet for a mast,
Stitch creeds together for a sail, with groans
To fill it out, bloodstained and aghast;
Although your rudder be a Dragon’s tail,
Long sever’d, yet still hard with agony,
Your cordage large uprootings from the skull
Of bald Medusa; certes you would fail
To find the Melancholy, whether she
Dreameth in any isle of Lethe dull.
No, no, go not to Lethe, neither twist
Wolf’s-bane, tight-rooted, for its poisonous wine;
Nor suffer thy pale forehead to be kiss’d
By nightshade, ruby grape of Proserpine;
Make not your rosary of yew-berries,
Nor let the beetle, nor the death-moth be
Your mournful Psyche, nor the downy owl
A partner in your sorrow’s mysteries;
For shade to shade will come too drowsily,
And drown the wakeful anguish of the soul.
But when the melancholy fit shall fall
Sudden from heaven like a weeping cloud,
That fosters the droop-headed flowers all,
And hides the green hill in an April shroud;
Then glut thy sorrow on a morning rose,
Or on the rainbow of the salt sand-wave,
Or on the wealth of globed peonies;
Or if thy mistress some rich anger shows,
Emprison her soft hand, and let her rave,
And feed deep, deep upon her peerless eyes.
She dwells with Beauty – Beauty that must die;
And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips
Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,
Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:
Ay, in the very temple of Delight
Veil’d Melancholy has her sovran shrine,
Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue
Can burst Joy’s grape against his palate fine;
His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,
And be among her cloudy trophies hung.