By the Sea by Dominic Rivron
(Voice 1)Fie, nay, prithee, John,
Do not quarrel, man!
Let's be merry and drink about;
(Voice 2)You're a rogue, you cheated me!
I'll prove before this company,
I caren't a farthing, sir,
for all you are so stout!
(Voice 1 or 3)Sir, you lie! I scorn your word,
or any man that wears a sword!
For all your huff, who cares a damn,
and who cares for you?
The days are getting shorter and darker. The air smells of fire. Everything is wet and brown. Nothing will really dry out now until the Spring although soon, it will freeze. The leaves that are left on the trees are hanging, limp. You can still hear the birds singing but there are fewer notes, more rests.
Bedale is not a big place and it was amazing to see how when thousands of people descended on it the usual rules ceased to apply. People just parked where there was a space to park: the whole place bristled with parked cars. The atmosphere was great and the fireworks incredible. I don't know how long it went on for - I lost all sense of time. The combination of the charity shop LP box favourite, The Planets Suite (which I really like) played full blast and a sky full of spectacular fireworks was overwhelming. Communal, exciting, straightforward, emotional, like a football match with the competitive bit taken out. Somehow they worked the Dr Who theme into it as well (and that would make the hairs on the back of my neck if I had any stand up on end even if I heard it through the world's tinniest clock radio). Part of me (not the hedgehog and cat-lover though) wishes we did it every Saturday night, from when the clocks go back to when they go forward again. But it would pall. Oh well, roll on Christmas...
Though many have heard of Sir Hugh Munro, creator of the famous list which gave birth to the sport of "Munro bagging", few have heard of Robert McTavish (1746-1795) - the unsung founder of Scottish mountaineering.
" A poem is energy transferred from where the poet got it (he will have some several causations), by way of the poem itself to, all the way over to, the reader. Okay. Then the poem itself must, at all points, be a high energy-construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge. So: how is the poet to accomplish same energy, how is he, what is the process by which a poet gets in, at all points energy at least the equivalent energy which propelled him in the first place, yet an energy which is peculiar to verse alone and which will be, obviously, different from the energy which the reader, because he is a third term, will take away?
This is the problem which any poet who departs from closed form is specially confronted by...
FORM IS NEVER MORE THAN AN EXTENSION OF CONTENT...
ONE PERCEPTION MUST IMMEDIATELY AND DIRECTLY LEAD TO A FURTHER PERCEPTION."
Charles Olson (1951)
"A first precaution for writers: in every text, every piece, every paragraph to check whether the central motif stands out clearly enough. Anyone wishing to express something is so carried away by it that he ceases to reflect on it...
One should never begrudge deletions. The length of a work is irrelevant, and the fear that not enough is on paper, childish...
When several sentences seem like variations on the same idea, they often only represent different attempts to grasp something the author has not yet mastered. Then the best formulation should be chosen and developed further. It is part of the technique of writing to be able to discard ideas, even fertile ones, if the construction demands it...
Properly written texts are like spiders' webs: tight, concentric, transparent, well-spun and firm."
Theodor Adorno (1951)