Hearing the Grass Grow
Not a long post as I've been marking undergraduate projects all day: my eyes are aching and my mind feels emptied of insightful response. But difficult though it is to have an original thought, in some ways it feels more important than ever to try to write something that isn't academese, response-based wording on a feedback form. (Inner critic to Space Poet: aren't you doing that, in a different way, just now: responding to words and experiences and memories on the virtual feedback form of the 'new post' page? Space Poet: I know what you mean, Inner Critic. But this still allows me to write for pleasure and personal documentation rather than duty, so I'll carry on if you don't mind too much.)
Before I started on the day's marking I watched a bit of the Arena program on T S Eliot from last Saturday. Lots in it (he had his own version of the madwoman in the attic, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, who nevertheless was clearly quite an influence on his work. She was eventually confined to a hospital here in Finsbury Park). I liked Jeanette Winterson's comments on Eliot's sensitive nature: 'he was so sensitive that he could hear the grass grow,' she said, figuratively. Well it sounds more organic and less predictable than sitting and watching the paint dry on the walls. It suggests an unavoidable, empathic receptivity to life: the thin-skinned princess who was left disturbed and sleepless by the pea at the bottom of her mattresses. Is it just a fairy tale, the Romantic idea of the poet as ultra sensitive outsider, or is there something to it...
Not launching into an Eliotic analysis here though. Three grass related observations instead. No not that kind of grass.
One of the shortest poems I've come across: Stevie Smith's 'All Things Pass'
All things pass
Love and mankind is grass
(sorry I don't have the accompanying doodle to reproduce. The poem itself is like a doodle, a transitory comment on the ephemeral nature of life. Except as a poem it rescues itself from the transitory, transposing it into the colloquial from the Biblical proverb but not necessarily draining it of resonance). And here's the same sort of sentiment, but with the grace of human friendship interlaced:
The Pleasures of Friendship
The pleasures of friendship are exquisite,
How pleasant to go to a friend on a visit!
I go to my friend, we walk on the grass,
And the hours and moments like minutes pass.
Don't underestimate the profundity of Stevie; she's a one off. I have a heavily annotated collected Stevie Smith - poems on yellow paper now, as it's decades old.
Another of the first poetry collections I bought, which itself had gone through 37 years of revision from its first publication in 1855: Walt Whitman's 'Leaves of Grass'. I bought my copy in a bookshop in Bergen in the late 80's with the proceeds of busking - Bach on the flute in the bus station subway. I was young. Financially I even did quite well - for a busker.
Here's the grassiest section, from 'Song of Myself'. Just last semester a student quizzed me over the meaning of grass being 'the handkerchief of the Lord'.
A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?
Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.
Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers' laps,
And here you are the mothers' laps.
This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.
Far more grass than you find in Eliot, though arguably you find the breath of free verse darkened and transferred to the devastated terrain of the Wasteland. The dry tubers...and before the Wasteland was Prufrock, whose yellow fog wandered the derelict streets, rubbing its back against the glass like a cat.
And a little black cat showed up again today, in our own small garden with its rapidly growing (thanks to all the weekend rain) grass. This cat sat outside the locked up cat flap, as it had yesterday and the day before, miaowing. I couldn't ignore it this evening, it (she, I think) was seriously hungry. Thin, and soft furred - young. No collar to claim or name it. I gave it a saucer of milk and it lapped up the lot. I don't think it's a great idea to feed other people's cats, nor is milk the best option; too rich. But I was genuinely concerned it was homeless and starving. Cats aren't normally that keen on drinking either, preferring to lick dew or raindrop from - blades of grass in fact. But this one didn't hesitate. Afterwards it rubbed its head against my hand and eventually consented to sit outside the glass kitchen door; back to us; protecting. Green grass and a revived cat playing incipient genius loci.
I wonder if she hears the grass grow as the vast world turns.
Before I started on the day's marking I watched a bit of the Arena program on T S Eliot from last Saturday. Lots in it (he had his own version of the madwoman in the attic, Vivienne Haigh-Wood, who nevertheless was clearly quite an influence on his work. She was eventually confined to a hospital here in Finsbury Park). I liked Jeanette Winterson's comments on Eliot's sensitive nature: 'he was so sensitive that he could hear the grass grow,' she said, figuratively. Well it sounds more organic and less predictable than sitting and watching the paint dry on the walls. It suggests an unavoidable, empathic receptivity to life: the thin-skinned princess who was left disturbed and sleepless by the pea at the bottom of her mattresses. Is it just a fairy tale, the Romantic idea of the poet as ultra sensitive outsider, or is there something to it...
Not launching into an Eliotic analysis here though. Three grass related observations instead. No not that kind of grass.
One of the shortest poems I've come across: Stevie Smith's 'All Things Pass'
All things pass
Love and mankind is grass
(sorry I don't have the accompanying doodle to reproduce. The poem itself is like a doodle, a transitory comment on the ephemeral nature of life. Except as a poem it rescues itself from the transitory, transposing it into the colloquial from the Biblical proverb but not necessarily draining it of resonance). And here's the same sort of sentiment, but with the grace of human friendship interlaced:
The Pleasures of Friendship
The pleasures of friendship are exquisite,
How pleasant to go to a friend on a visit!
I go to my friend, we walk on the grass,
And the hours and moments like minutes pass.
Don't underestimate the profundity of Stevie; she's a one off. I have a heavily annotated collected Stevie Smith - poems on yellow paper now, as it's decades old.
Another of the first poetry collections I bought, which itself had gone through 37 years of revision from its first publication in 1855: Walt Whitman's 'Leaves of Grass'. I bought my copy in a bookshop in Bergen in the late 80's with the proceeds of busking - Bach on the flute in the bus station subway. I was young. Financially I even did quite well - for a busker.
Here's the grassiest section, from 'Song of Myself'. Just last semester a student quizzed me over the meaning of grass being 'the handkerchief of the Lord'.
A child said What is the grass? fetching it to me with full hands;
How could I answer the child? I do not know what it is any more than he.
I guess it must be the flag of my disposition, out of hopeful green stuff woven.
Or I guess it is the handkerchief of the Lord,
A scented gift and remembrancer designedly dropt,
Bearing the owner's name someway in the corners, that we may see and remark, and say Whose?
Or I guess the grass is itself a child, the produced babe of the vegetation.
Or I guess it is a uniform hieroglyphic,
And it means, Sprouting alike in broad zones and narrow zones,
Growing among black folks as among white,
Kanuck, Tuckahoe, Congressman, Cuff, I give them the same, I receive them the same.
And now it seems to me the beautiful uncut hair of graves.
Tenderly will I use you curling grass,
It may be you transpire from the breasts of young men,
It may be if I had known them I would have loved them,
It may be you are from old people, or from offspring taken soon out of their mothers' laps,
And here you are the mothers' laps.
This grass is very dark to be from the white heads of old mothers,
Darker than the colorless beards of old men,
Dark to come from under the faint red roofs of mouths.
Far more grass than you find in Eliot, though arguably you find the breath of free verse darkened and transferred to the devastated terrain of the Wasteland. The dry tubers...and before the Wasteland was Prufrock, whose yellow fog wandered the derelict streets, rubbing its back against the glass like a cat.
And a little black cat showed up again today, in our own small garden with its rapidly growing (thanks to all the weekend rain) grass. This cat sat outside the locked up cat flap, as it had yesterday and the day before, miaowing. I couldn't ignore it this evening, it (she, I think) was seriously hungry. Thin, and soft furred - young. No collar to claim or name it. I gave it a saucer of milk and it lapped up the lot. I don't think it's a great idea to feed other people's cats, nor is milk the best option; too rich. But I was genuinely concerned it was homeless and starving. Cats aren't normally that keen on drinking either, preferring to lick dew or raindrop from - blades of grass in fact. But this one didn't hesitate. Afterwards it rubbed its head against my hand and eventually consented to sit outside the glass kitchen door; back to us; protecting. Green grass and a revived cat playing incipient genius loci.
I wonder if she hears the grass grow as the vast world turns.
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