New Year, one day in
So strange to think that a whole decade has passed since the ushering in of the new millennium; so much has changed since then in the world and in my life: a decade both fast-moving and of momentous change. I'm so much more settled now than I was at that time, and I'm grateful for that - call it the onset of middle age, but stability is a wonderful thing. I realised some time ago that confidence is not a quality I'm ever going to experience in abundance, but I do have at least a degree of happiness that I've got where I am and am doing what I'm doing. How nice to see in the New Year with K- and our two glossy coated kittens, who seemed relatively unaffected by fireworks and the general lateness of their humans' bedtime.
Resolutions this year are of the usual sort - better use of time, greater focus at work, keep up with friends, healthier lifestyle etc. And in between all these grand practical plans, poetry is still trickling through; the cement that keeps the bricks of obligations together; or the oil which makes the joints and limbs work, or the music that helps the mind process and feet move, or some such.
First of January is a day that is both off the work circuit and a 'first day' of good intentions. So no actual work done but I have been browsing a new purchase on the Confessional Poets, Adam Kirsch's 'The Wounded Surgeon' which looks at Lowell, Bishop, Berryman and others, all associated to some degree with the American 'Confessionals' who I'll be lecturing on in the Spring semester. Elizabeth Bishop in particular is such a hard poet to classify; Kirsch makes much of her surprising emotional connection to Dylan Thomas. ‘The first time I met Dylan…I felt frightened for him and depressed. Yet I found him tremendously sympathetic at the same time…in my own minor way I know enough about drink & destruction’. Kirsh suggests that Bishop saw Thomas as a sort of sorcerer’s apprentice, unable to control destructive and addictive urges which Bishop herself could barely keep under control.
Thomas’ poetry celebrates the life-force, the interconnectivity in all things. There are obvious stylistic differences between his work and Bishop’s – and indeed between her work and that of other 'confessionals' such as Lowell and Sexton - her friend Mary McCarthy commented that Bishop only permitted so much self-revelation in her poems as though she is an ‘I counting up to a hundred waiting to be found’. But there is a sense of anguished meaninglessness in some of Bishop’s poems which perhaps indicate that she would long for a sense of connectedness such as Thomas put forth. Often for Bishop there is the despair that everything is ‘‘only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and’’; by a sort of random and purposeless contiguity, with no real through line. Or only the perspectives we as writers or thinkers temporarily impose.
When I think of journals and blogs in particular (I know this wasn't Bishop's intended area of reflection) it's often a case of entries linked by 'and' and 'and'; the chain of recorded days providing both contigency and developing themes in unequal measure. Well then, let us continue to think and write, and to fail to come to watertight conclusions.
Apropos of none of the above, a tearful exit of David Tennant from the Tardis. He cedes to Matt Smith, and too early yet to say which character elements will be continued and which broken with or reversed; what storylines developed and how random or picaresque will the new adventures be. A theme for a future post, perhaps when I've watched the two episodes of this final story again back to back.
Resolutions this year are of the usual sort - better use of time, greater focus at work, keep up with friends, healthier lifestyle etc. And in between all these grand practical plans, poetry is still trickling through; the cement that keeps the bricks of obligations together; or the oil which makes the joints and limbs work, or the music that helps the mind process and feet move, or some such.
First of January is a day that is both off the work circuit and a 'first day' of good intentions. So no actual work done but I have been browsing a new purchase on the Confessional Poets, Adam Kirsch's 'The Wounded Surgeon' which looks at Lowell, Bishop, Berryman and others, all associated to some degree with the American 'Confessionals' who I'll be lecturing on in the Spring semester. Elizabeth Bishop in particular is such a hard poet to classify; Kirsch makes much of her surprising emotional connection to Dylan Thomas. ‘The first time I met Dylan…I felt frightened for him and depressed. Yet I found him tremendously sympathetic at the same time…in my own minor way I know enough about drink & destruction’. Kirsh suggests that Bishop saw Thomas as a sort of sorcerer’s apprentice, unable to control destructive and addictive urges which Bishop herself could barely keep under control.
Thomas’ poetry celebrates the life-force, the interconnectivity in all things. There are obvious stylistic differences between his work and Bishop’s – and indeed between her work and that of other 'confessionals' such as Lowell and Sexton - her friend Mary McCarthy commented that Bishop only permitted so much self-revelation in her poems as though she is an ‘I counting up to a hundred waiting to be found’. But there is a sense of anguished meaninglessness in some of Bishop’s poems which perhaps indicate that she would long for a sense of connectedness such as Thomas put forth. Often for Bishop there is the despair that everything is ‘‘only connected by ‘and’ and ‘and’’; by a sort of random and purposeless contiguity, with no real through line. Or only the perspectives we as writers or thinkers temporarily impose.
When I think of journals and blogs in particular (I know this wasn't Bishop's intended area of reflection) it's often a case of entries linked by 'and' and 'and'; the chain of recorded days providing both contigency and developing themes in unequal measure. Well then, let us continue to think and write, and to fail to come to watertight conclusions.
Apropos of none of the above, a tearful exit of David Tennant from the Tardis. He cedes to Matt Smith, and too early yet to say which character elements will be continued and which broken with or reversed; what storylines developed and how random or picaresque will the new adventures be. A theme for a future post, perhaps when I've watched the two episodes of this final story again back to back.
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