#now where's that one poem about blackberry picking...

[sunjoys]

love is stored in the blackberries you pick with someone you love

[aparticularbandit]

see, here's the thing.

i like giving characters i write very specific scents. i like thinking about it, like thinking about what that says about the character, so on and so forth.

agatha smells like cinnamon, vanilla, honey, and apples - she smells like apple pie, mainly - but it's the cinnamon that cuts through the most, sharp and homey. (rereading fragments gave me the honey back; i'd actually forgotten about it.)

claire smells like vanilla. or like something achingly floral your grandmother might wear. it's non-threatening and familiar (which fits in with the clothes she chooses to wear as a politician - white, beige, non-threatening). (this is different in the valentines au where she isn't as focused on being non-threatening, on being something easily accepted.)

cian smells outdoorsy but with something fruit-like underneath it. not fruity because it's not a sweet fruit scent. it's a more masculine scent, but not entirely. ambiguous as much as they are.

eve smells like blackberries (and wine or champagne), but specifically blackberries because of this poem, which on the surface is about blackberry picking but is actually totally about sex. which. that's eve.

(jess i think smells like rose petals and honey? but that is taken directly from the first book, i didn't choose that.)

(and i think rose was strawberries and lavender? because i very specifically did not want her to just be strawberries. but it has been a while since i wrote rose, and i might be remembering wrong. it was strawberries and something.)

anyway. reason i'm bringing this up.

i've only got one specified scent in the danganronpa fic right now, and it belongs to junko.

i wanted something sharp and tangy, and my mind immediately raspberries. which are both of those and also surprisingly tart, when you eat them. (because the smell of food can also remind you of the taste of food, they're very intertwined, etc. etc.)

and then i thought. you know what would really be perfect for junko?

blue raspberries.

[erinaceina]

Bryd one Brere: Lymond Fanfic

Thank you to @notasapleasure for the prompt.

The slender hands held out to Francis Crawford were red to the wrists, thickly layered with crimson stains, the tapering fingers and smooth, oval nails grained with dark gore. Philippa's gown, once as hazily blue as the summer sky, was streaked now with madder and scarlet, the linen shift frayed and draggling on the dusty ground and the cuffs clotted and soaked. Even her face had not escaped unscathed; a darkening line bisected one arching brow and her lips were blotched and reddened. She stood before him like some arcane and ancient sacrifice revealed beneath the clear summer sun of Northumberland and Lymond simply gazed upon her for a long moment, that same sun gilding his fair hair and gleaming in his densely lashed blue eyes. His own hands hung slack at his sides, the sleeves of his doublet neatly folded to reveal skin faintly touched with colour over the damascening of old scars. The silence was absolute, save for the chuckling of a blackbird and the sound of their breathing and, far off, the song of the Tyne in its broad, green valley.

'Three times my will urged me to clasp her, and I started towards her, three times she escaped my arms like a shadow or a dream.' The gentian eyes were alive with unholy mirth and it rang in the warm, mellow timbre of his voice. 'Are we summoning the shades of the dead out of Erebus, dearest Philippa? I see that you have no need for the inky ram nor the knife, but there is still the milk and honey to find.'

Frowning, Philippa touched one finger to the gory smear at her brow and, bringing it to her lips, sucked it reflectively. 'Blackberry,' she explained succinctly, examining the other berry-stained hand.

'I had noticed,' Francis said gravely, eying the marks of the afternoon's blackberrying streaked on disreputable gown and flesh and the empty withy trug at her stoutly shod feet. 'He be noght full of thornes and breres of synnes. Nor, dear Philippa, is your basket.'

Philippa grinned, a little sheepishly, her gaze moving over his own entirely respectable if somewhat antique doublet, the slash of warm, faintly damp skin where it lay unlaced at the collar, and the finely turned line of cheek and jaw, innocent of betraying berry stains. 'Blake-berries that on breres growen. Even Sevigny has nothing to match Hexham blackberries; I'm afraid I lost count.'

'Blithe as bryd one brere, I see, my faire bryd, me swete cynamome.' The dappled shade of the hedgerow threw quick, green shadows on his hair and face as Francis stepped closer. Raising one long-fingered hand, he brushed the sticky, escaping tangle of hair from her brow, bending to kiss a stray smear of blackberry juice where she had done the same. 'Blythful biryd, on me thu rewe and tell me: are we to boil and strain our cotignac like mortal men, or shall it be wrung from our bloodied brow like Pallas Athena?'

'I rather imagine that we shall use yours, as you don't seem to have eaten any at all.' Philippa glanced pointedly at the pale, unmarked curve of his lower lip and swayed closer, momentarily distracted.

'I thought that we had been harried forth by Kate to gather berries for cotignac and for blackberry wine and not to gorge ourselves like mice at harvesting.'

Philippa snuffled with half-restrained laughter, and, unable to resist, brought her hand to rest lightly at his hip, her thumb restlessly caressing the tensile flesh under the hem of his doublet. 'Oh, Francis, Francis, haven't all the courts of Europe and the Levant managed to teach you how to pick blackberries properly? The cotignac and the wine are entirely incidental.'

'So I see.' He was very close now, his breath touching her lips, and she was drowning in the reckless joy of his presence. 'Fortunately, I have no need to return to the thicket and the bramble when you have eaten a sufficiency of the blackberry, the wringings of which fruit it is good that man should eat against heartburn and pyrosis. Dear Philippa, sweet is as the brembre...'

Francis closed the final, unbearable distance between them at last, his mouth brushing hers as he licked the savour of the blackberries from her lips, seeking out the tart and the sweet together in a kiss that lingered until her hands were fisted in the cloth of his doublet and she was breathing in sharp gasps of sensation and desire that matched his own. With less grace than they were accustomed to use, they tumbled together to the close-cropped grass, his mouth leaving hers only to explore the scratched and sticky delight of her hands until she was living flame, burning like the Hesperides in the vaulting sky. And, over and over, he pressed the words of love and desire that bound them together into flesh scented by blackberries and sunlight until the scent was upon him too and all the wide world a bower of briars about them.

'Of mi sorwe yhe may me saven Ioye and blisse were were me newe.'

***********************************************

Notes: Cotignac is usually made from quinces and plays a small part in Queen’s Play. I decided that there was no reason that the Somervilles (who, after all, tend to Do Their Own Thing) couldn’t add blackberries to theirs.

'Three times my will urged me to clasp her, and I started towards her, three times she escaped my arms like a shadow or a dream' – Odyssey, Book XI, in which Odysseus uses a blood sacrifice to summon the shades of the dead. Thanks to @notasapleasure for this reference.

'He be noght full of thornes and breres of synnes' – the Rolle Psalter.

'Blake-berries that on breres growen' – William of Palerne: An Alliterative Romance.

'My faire bryd, me swete cynamome' – Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale.

'Sweet as is the brembre flour' - Chaucer’s Tale of Sir Thopas. 

'The wringings of which fruit it is good that man should eat against heartburn and pyrosis' – my own paraphrase of an Old English remedy for heartburn (I think it’s from the Leechbook, but the OED isn't recognising my login so I can't check).

The title and the other quotes are references to this poem: http://www.luminarium.org/medlit/medlyric/brere.php. I couldn't resist the bird/bride pun.

[peepingtoad]

Anonymous Fanmail // always accepting

Good evening (or day) to you anon! Let me say first off how touching it was to see this message pop up earlier on! I know my activity has been spotty as hell lately, with inspiration being flaky and my attention span even more so--so it really is encouraging to hear that the little I've managed to do in the past couple of months is still well received.

From reading your message it seems like you have a great handle on writing and vocabulary, but I also know that English really can be a bastard of a language whenever it deviates from the standard. So I can only commend your commitment to gaining even more understanding.

So to answer your question, under the cut are some of the authors/works that have influenced me most. I’ve not really had a chance to make my way through my huge reading list, or read much for a couple years now, so I’ll just mention some of the ones that really stuck in my mind:

Darren Shan 

I really must start with Darren Shan, because for a teen author his descriptions of monsters and violence still are some of the most viscerally gross and visual I've ever read. So you can imagine what it was like reading him as a 9/10 year old! I don't get to show it very often on Jiraiya, but I really do love to write a bit of nasty gore where I can. This probably shows more when I'm writing certain toad stomach themed jutsu scenes... but yeah. This author really inspired me as a kid, and fantasy-horror for young adults is still a genre I'd love to write one day (if I ever come up with a solid original idea, that is)! Which leads me on to--

Stephen King

Who, honestly, I haven't really kept up to date with. The novels I read by him were his classics: Carrie, Misery, Pet Sematary... which I think were all written before I was born, now that I think about it. I know he can be a little long-winded for some, but I really appreciate how he builds up tension and works with multiple threads at a time. His are some of the few books that actually made me scared in my teens, his psychological horror is great, and he doesn’t shy away from a sex scene, even if they’re usually horrible. I always love an author who goes into nitty-gritty, not necessarily pleasant detail.

J.R.R.R.R.R.R.R.R.R.R. Tolkien

A predictable one, I'm sure! But I've definitely drawn influence from the sheer world-building of Middle Earth, which has inspired worlds for my own OCs, but in regards to fandom has made me want to delve a little deeper into areas the canon leaves unexplained (it really is my goal to one day fill in all the blanks in Jiraiya's life, working with what little we were given and the messy timeline). And while Tolkien's characters can be a little wooden and overly functional at times, the true joy I find in his works is the sprawling descriptions of nature and the world, and how well-linked all of the characters/figures of the past are to each other. Also I feel it's an unpopular opinion, but I absolutely adore the songs/poems. Every one of them. Especially 'The Ent and the Entwife'.

Richard Adams

Most known for Watership Down, and his style again contains lots of beautiful nature imagery (with a very strong environmentalist lean). It's a pretty traumatic story, as anyone who has seen the animated film from the late 70's will recall, but what the book offers on top of that is a whole mythology that the animals believe in, world-building, animal characters that are both intelligent and believably still animals, gorgeous descriptions of the English countryside... yeah. It's one of my all time favourites! I’ve yet to bring myself to read The Plague Dogs, however, because I know it will upset me a whole lot.

Whoever the hell wrote 'The Soddit' and 'Bored of the Rings'

Yes, seriously. I'm a sucker for a good spoof, and these made me laugh out loud. I recall many terrible euphemisms. Not to be read with a critical mind whatsoever :’) they are kinda trash, but I really enjoy content that doesn’t take itself very seriously.

Terry Pratchett

Count this as a relatively new inspiration--I'm an absolute newbie when it comes to Pratchett, if I'm honest, which is ridiculous because it’s right up my alley. I’ve only fully read Good Omens (with Neil Gaiman), read halfway through a few of the standalone Discworlds, and watched several of the animated and BBC series adaptations, but I’m definitely inspired. It's just really daunting to know where to start with the main body of Discworld in particular. But I think after spending my childhood enjoying comedic fantasy in general (I also thank the Fable trilogy of games for that), it was only natural that I found his tongue-in-cheek, conversational to the point of being mundane, playing with tropes style a perfect fit for me. All of that, with some pretty immense world-building in too! It’s great to see such a loved world that is written in such a light, funny way (from what I’ve read), especially since I do my best to let humour inject itself into my writing wherever possible.

Oscar Wilde

And more specifically, The Picture of Dorian Gray. This is just peak gothic sexy decadence, I assure you. And it's one of my all time favourites... again, for gorgeous descriptions, but it's more sensory than physical. And of course, high-key gay subtext. And did I mention it's sexy? Not in the obvious way, just in a 'this level of indulgent description of luxuries and hedonism is downright slutty' kind of way. If you want obvious sexy though, definitely check out the film starring Ben Barnes too!

Anaïs Nin

Ok look, so in answer to one of your other questions, I do indeed read fanfic. Not as much now as I used to or would like to, but I certainly do. And Anaïs Nin is one of the few well known erotic writers I’ve read that I think is better than the best fanfiction stuff I’ve read. Because honestly, lots of them are dudes (sorry Jiraiya) and it’s just... nah. I’ve always thought that the erotic writing in decent fanfic tended to be high tier for somebody not paid to do it. Anyway, when it comes to Nin the writing is beautifully sensual, but I’ll warn you for questionable content at times--and I mean triggering content. I think that a lot of her erotic short stories were commissioned by others, so I don’t judge her, but there is also a lot of symbolism within the taboo so... that’s my warning about that.

John Keats

Time for a poet, and one of my favourites is this guy. Pretty much covering the Romantic/Gothic cusp, all the poems I remember reading by him were long, indulgent, sensual and low-key filthy. I can’t really say much other than read Keats! ‘Isabella, or the Pot of Basil’ is a favourite!

Seamus Heaney

My favourites are ‘Death Of a Naturalist’ and ‘Blackberry-Picking’. Get that gross, kinda visceral nature imagery. Nice.

Wilfred Owen

Mostly studied him in college, which I enjoyed a lot, but I ended up revisiting his war poetry when I started writing Jiraiya. Something about the way he questions patriotism and feels for the ‘enemy’ related a lot to him for me, and the poems themselves are so tragic they really spark up your empathy.

... As for songwriters? Hmm. Lyrically, I always enjoy pretty gloomy stuff. Nick Cave, The Cure, Placebo, Depeche Mode. A lot of it very spooky and sad-romantic. I definitely have a type :’) a definite favourite is also Björk, both for her surreal lyrics, and the crazy stuff she can do with her voice also helps!

I’m honestly struggling to think of more off the top of my head, because I know I have read and enjoyed more books/poetry than this. Sadly I’ve been too preoccupied with other things to branch out into more world literature, but it’s something I want to make an effort to do--especially Chinese and Japanese literature, some of which are on my current book pile. But these are some of the few that came straight to mind for me, and are probably my biggest influences. Hope you enjoyed my lengthy rambling nonetheless. And again, thank you so much for your kind message! It really lifted my spirits <3

[livvywrites]

11/11/11 tag

I was tagged by the lovely @waterfallwritings​. Thank you so much <3 

1. How do you come up with ideas for your WIPs?

I put my headphones on, pop some music on, and pace around. And then I play pretend.

No, really, that’s what I do. I pretend to be my characters, in different situations, and I just... play around. I mess with things. I put them in modern situations. I put them in my favorite TV shows/books/movies/games. I have them switch places with a character in that show/book/movie/game. Sometimes I find them narrating their backstory to their future kid, or their friends, or whoever. I dunno. All sorts of crazy situations.

When that doesn’t help, I go and read. Or watch something. Or play something. I give it a rest for a bit. Something eventually comes to me. 

2. How do you get past gaps in the plot?

Same answer as above, I guess? Letting myself really feel the characters, really be them, helps me view the situation as they would. I can generally resolve gaps pretty well that way! 

3. What motivates you to keep writing?

My characters.

Sometimes it feels like they live in my head, just waiting for me to tell their story. I think about it all the time. 

But other than that... 

I mean, I was hospitalized a bunch as a kid. I got pneumonia a lot. And bronchitis (which developed into the former). A common cold could turn into bronchitis. I was a sickly kid with a terrible immune system. So I read. I read a lot. I read anything I could get my hands on. (Word of advice: Jurrassic Park and Stephen King novels are not really appropriate novels for a 10 year old to read. Or at least not one who hates gore. Like me.) A lot of those books touched me, influenced me and how I behaved growing up. I want to do that for other people. I want to write the novel they pick up and find themselves needing.

Also, you know what? 

Sometimes my writing is pretty damn good. 

4. Do you do any other kind of creative writing?

I write poetry!! My favorite poems are: 

Death (lightly nsfw)

Wolf-Women (feminist poetry with werewolf themes) 

Lonely Ghosts (Travelin’ Endlessly)

This poem I wrote about the main character of TMQ

I also roleplay for a favorite fandom of mine, and I write fanfiction. (You can find my stuff on my main blog, which is linked in my bio.) 

5. Do you have any other creative hobbies besides writing?

I like to take photos! Usually of flowers and such. I’ll reblog this with some of my favorite ones~ 

I also like editing photos. By which I mean throwing lots of filters on them and trying to make them look ~artsy.~ 

6. What do you do when you’re stuck on a scene and don’t know how to get it out / write it?

I whip out my brackets. And I write a short scene description. Here’s an example off the top of my head-- 

[Fight scene. CHARACTER A gets injured pretty badly and begins to sway. CHARACTER B is so absorbed by their lover being hurt that they don’t notice when CHARACTER C is grabbed behind them. By the time they realized C has been kidnapped... it’s too late. CHARACTER A dies in their arms, but not before making them promise to save CHARACTER C.] 

That’s a really emotional scene, fraught with tension and violence. Maybe I wasn’t feeling it, so I skipped it. But I want to remember what I was doing, hence the summary. Then I move on to the next scene. What the next scene would be in this scenario, I have no idea. 

7. How do you decide how to end your WIP?

I’ve never really tried to put it into words, but because you asked, I’m gonna try.

So the first thing I think about is what my protagonist wants. In THE MARTYR QUEEN, Alinora wants her home back. She wants her people free again, and her family/loved ones back. Unfortunately, most of said loved ones are dead. But she can still save her people, so that’s her primary goal. To save her people, she needs to defeat Kai’os, and get him off of her throne/out of her homeland. 

Now, let’s look at the antagonist. Kai’os wants to end the world and start a new one. Well--he doesn’t really want to do that, but he believes it’s a necessary evil, because that’s what Fate told him. What he really wants is to keep his family--his two daughters--safe. And that’s how he can best do that. According to Fate. In order to end the world, he has to be able to get to the World Tree. And to get to that, he needs Alinora.

So obviously, at the ending, the two of them are going to clash.

But what happens during/after the clash? Well, now, that’s where I have to think about the OTHER things going on. Alinora’s personality, for instance. What her friends are doing. The “bigger” players in the game--Death and Fate. What I have planned for the next books, and what I need to have happen for Alinora’s character arc. 

I hope that was a good explanation ^^; 

8. When in the process of writing do you decide how its going to end? Or do you kind of just wait til you get there?

I generally know my endings before I’m even halfway through the story. TMQ’s I knew before I even started writing it. Sapphire Dreaming’s I realized pretty early in the game as well. 

9. Why did you decide to join writeblr?

I have been looking for a supportive writing community for so long. I found one on a fantasy forum called Worldsmyths that’s lovely, but people are more apt to talk about the technical aspects of writing on there. Which is great, and all of the advice on there is really good and well thought out. But I also really, really like hearing about other people’s WIPs and talking about mine in turn.

So when I found out that was how Tumblr’s writeblr worked... that’s when I decided to start getting involved in the community. And I’ve found so many WIPs that way!!! And found people who like my ideas too, which was like: what? Because while I’ve met supportive people before this is different. And it’s really nice.

10. What’s your favourite food?

Favorite... food?

I have to... I have to pick?

But, but ToT I can’t.

I’ll try anyway though,  I guess, because you asked :P 

Let’s see... my favorite dessert is a toss up between tiramasu and cheesecake, but I also really, really like brownies. 

Breakfast wise, it’s hard to go wrong with blueberry pancakes or a bacon, egg, and cheese sandwich. Or omelets. 

For lunch, I really like sandwiches. Lately I’ve been on a subway kick, and I’ve been ordering a tomato basil wrap with rotisserie chicken, mozz cheese, spinach leaves, ranch dressing, and green peppers. It’s so good. 

For supper... Oh, jeez. I eat a lot of chicken and pasta, but I also really like steak and bbq!! 

I’m not a big fan of fruit, but I like blackberries and raspberries!! I also really like peaches and cherries. 

I love vegetables. My favorites are peas, broccoli, and cucumbers. 

...what. was that not in the spirit of the question? 

11. If you had to kill off a character in your WIP, who would it be and why?

Um.

So in Sapphire Dreaming, if I had to kill a character off... fuck. I dunno. Maddock, I guess? Side characters are okay right? His death could be really fun, though it would absolutely destroy Aura.

I mean, if I had to choose a main character... I guess it’d be Chase. I love him a lot, I really do, and he is important to the story but. I can’t get rid of Aura or Melantha or [SPOILER]. 

In The Martyr Queen... 

Um. 

I actually answer that question in the story itself, so, uh.

I’m just gonna. Move on to the tags & new questions now. 

I tag:@witchywrite; @marniebalboa; @quartzses; @she-writes-love; @idreamonpaper (lemme know if you want to be added or removed. yes i know this isn’t eleven people.  get nervous about tagging people in things ^^;) 

My questions are: 

1. Do you have any ideas for future WIPs you’re excited about?

2. What’s your favorite part of writing?

3. What’s your favorite aspect of the genre you write?

4. What themes/tropes do you find show up in the majority of your ideas? (E.g. found family, belonging, love triangles, etc.) 

5. Do you have a routine or ritual you do before writing? (E.g. lighting a candle, putting on a playlist, making a specific beverage)

6. What would your ideal place to write look like?

7. Do you sort your characters into, say Hogwarts Houses or Meyers Briggs Types? (Or other kinds of archetypes?) If so, which characters fall where?

8. Have you ever participated in a character chat? (An almost roleplay chat where you introduce your characters to other characters. Sometimes they’re focused around a time limit with specific questions, as on Twitter, but sometimes they’re more free form.)

9. How much prewriting do you do before you start writing?

10. What’s the last book you finished reading? Would you recommend it?

11.  What’s your favorite piece of writing advice, or favorite quote about writing? 

[naturecoaster]

Nature Coast State of Emergency Options

What should one do in the Nature Coast State of Emergency? With nearly every public facility, event, and meeting being closed through the end of March, NatureCoasters' lives are being disrupted in a BIG way. Still, panicking is not a good option. Prayer is a good option. Staying in one’s home can get mundane, so what is a NatureCoaster to do? There are many outdoor activities in our area that will allow safe space and provide excellent recreational opportunities. This is a great time to indulge in that kayak trip you have been putting off.

Kayaking opportunities about on Florida's Nature Coast. Here is an image from Pat Manfredo from her trip on the Pithlachascotee River. Walk in the State Forest or any one of our wonderful parks. Take a bike ride on the Withlacoochee Trail. Have you tried walking Brooksville's new Florida Mermaid Trail? Ride a horse. Go fishing. Rent a boat and tour the seas.

This little angel has just helped her mom, brother and grandma pick a bucket of strawberries at JG Ranch, a u-pick farm in Brooksville that offers strawberries, blueberries, blackberries, corn, and assorted produce in season, as well as fresh eggs and locally-made items at their produce stand on the farm. Joan and George Casey, as well as Jeff and Debbie Casey, and their children, run this family farm. Image by Diane Bedard. Go to a u-pick farm. There are several u-pick farms in Florida’s Nature Coast, and this is a great activity with delicious and nutritious benefits. Blueberry season is only a few weeks away. Strawberry season is winding up and several vegetables are in season now. Be sure to call before you venture out for hours and availability. You have choices that fit the parameters of COVID-19 safety guidelines You have the opportunity to make this a special time where you might work on gardening projects, paint or draw, read a book, write a poem or a story, or any myriad of hobbyist activities. Take a minute to inventory what is available in your location and fight the tendency to panic. Deep cleaning and organizing is always an option. You are not alone.

Always good food, good friends and great coffee at Cattle Dog Coffee Roasters on Tompkins Street. Cattle Dog's five Citrus County locations are open for business, following CDC guidelines and now offer curbside pickup with online orders. Image by Margaret Bronder. Restrictions for Restaurants, Bars & Beaches On March 17, Saint Patrick’s Day, Florida's Governor, Ron DeSantis, sent an Executive Order effectively shutting down sales in bars that receive 50% or more of their revenues from beer, wine and liquor sales for 30 days. BOOM Restaurants are allowed to stay open now but must institute a safe space policy of 50% of their capacity. This means that every other dining table is open for business if a restaurant chooses to continue serving food providing the six-foot space we need to keep while under our State of Emergency. Many restaurants are now offering curbside pickup and may have special procedures for that service. For example, Cattle Dog Coffee Roasters began curbside pickup service, but orders must be placed and paid for online. Please call ahead.

If you get out to a restaurant, please tip your servers very generously if you can. Image courtesy of Robin Draper. Servers are being hit hard. If you choose to eat in a restaurant or get take out food, please tip generously – ridiculously generously. That may be what keeps their lights on. Beaches are not closed, but visitors must keep a six-foot distance between each party. Parties should be limited to ten. Gatherings should be less than 50 and outdoors is preferred.

The Valerie Theater in downtown Inverness is one of many public facilities that was temporarily closed to help prevent the spread of the Coronavirus on Florida's Nature Coast. Image by Diane Bedard. Nature Coast Libraries, Schools, Courthouses, and Public Buildings All Nature Coast schools were closed in the last week through the end of March (more or less – check your school’s website for specific dates). Children are home and many parents are working from home. Most public buildings and libraries are closed to the public for indoor activities, like paying bills, renting books and movies and Wi-Fi access. Cultural programs are closed. Movie and live performance theatres are closed. Museums are closed. Libraries are offering Wi-Fi outdoors, but no public computers. Books can be reserved online and picked up at library locations, but there is no indoor service. Jury trials are suspended in the courts and all government offices such as tax collectors and driver license bureaus can be managed online. Please do so.

Navigating the challenges of working from home with your children present requires a new style of balance. Image courtesy of Pixabay. How to Work from Home with your Children there When I was in my early 30s, I started my entrepreneurial journey with two toddlers (Irish twins) at home. It was truly a challenge to manage work around their schedules, but I learned a lot. I want to share some of that knowledge with those of you who are suddenly thrust into the work from home scenario. Balance is key. Children do not innately understand why anything is more important than their immediate “needs.” As they get older, they learn to put others first. This means they don’t understand why you are staring at that computer now instead of playing with them. Try to schedule time for both in the workday.

Sometimes the schedule has to be foregone to keep the balance. Image courtesy of Pixabay. When my children took a nap, I worked. If someone called during the awake hours and I was disrupted, I would say, “Oh, that’s my management team. They’re being cranky.” This would make the client/boss and I laugh. We would reschedule or muddle through depending on the situation. The laughter broke the ice and made things much easier to resolve. Now is a time to give each other lots of grace – including ourselves and our families. Why outdoors?

Get outdoors and get healthy with Florida sunshine and fresh air. Image by Diane Bedard. The Florida Sunshine provides health benefits to our bodies. Our skin absorbs vitamin D from sun exposure. It is good for us. Here is an interesting article on Coronavirus and the Sun by Dr. Richard Hobday, an internationally recognized authority on health in the built environment. Fresh air is a proven aid in the healing process. Indoor air is recycled, so germs are recycled too. Apparently fresh air lets the germs go away – maybe through photosynthesis. Maybe through rain and dew. I don’t know why or how. I just know it works.

When finances look bleak, be sure to ask your creditors for grace. Often by being ahead of the problem, you can work out a solution and skip the sleepless nights. Image courtesy of Dean Moriarty via Pixabay. What about Income? I believe we will all be affected financially by this crisis. Still, panicking does not help. I have read news stating that Congress and the President are talking about printing money and sending each of us $1,000 or so. That will surely help, but I don’t recommend waiting for it. If and when it works out, we will know what to do with it. If it looks like you are going to be short in an area of debt, contact whomever you owe and work out an alternate payment plan. This is a temporary situation. Maybe you can skip this month’s payment, and have it added to the end of the loan? No-one wants to make it worse. Being proactive in this area can save you sleepless nights and credit score drops.

Image courtesy of Pixabay. What Can a NatureCoaster Do? If you are able to help someone out, please do so. Share a roll of toilet paper or two. Call those who are stuck in facilities and cannot have visitors. Mail letters and cards. Donate blood. There is a real shortage right now. Can you volunteer remotely? Nonprofits are sending NatureCoaster updates saying they are planning to continue offering services, but they may be implemented differently. If you can donate time, money or resources to a nonprofit, now is a great time to do so.

What to Do in the Nature Coast State of Emergency

Anglers of all sizes love Homosassa's fishing! Residents of Citrus, Hernando and Pasco Counties are blessed with many outdoor activity resources. Our park systems are large and, although events and gatherings are canceled, the parks, forests, rivers, lakes, and Gulf are still open and ready for you to enjoy. Get outside, while minding your Ps&Qs to thoroughly wash your hands, stay 6 feet from others, and pray for each and every human in this world – may we become better people in a better society through the challenges we rise up to today. There many outdoor activities in Florida’s Nature Coast that allow safe space and provide excellent recreational opportunities.

The Hunter Springs Park beach provides a wonderful launch for any kayaking adventure with the Hunter Springs Kayak team. Image by Diane Bedard. This could be a great time to indulge in that kayak trip you have been putting off. Walk in the State Forest or any one of our wonderful parks and botanical gardens.

Sunset Landing Marina in Port Richey has beautiful pontoon boat rentals to help you catch a coastal state of mind. Ride a horse. Go fishing. Rent a pontoon boat and enjoy the gulf breeze. Go to a u-pick farm. Blueberry season is only a few weeks away. Strawberry season is winding up and several vegetables are in season now. We welcome a new NatureCoaster this week with The Dolan House in Brooksville. Perhaps a stay-cation with Debra and Roger King providing a respite from your home would be in order? They make one heckuva breakfast – and pastries!

Perhaps a staycation at The Dolan House to clear the head? Their motto of ABC of Always Be Clean makes for confidence in their historic B & B. Image courtesy of The Dolan House. If you have small businesses that you patronize regularly perhaps it would be nice to check on them. Shops are still open for business in most cases, as are many restaurants with take-out and limited hours. Florida’s Nature Coast is woven with the fabric of small businesses and we all need each other to make it through the tough times. Take a minute to inventory what is available in your location and fight the tendency to panic. You are not alone. Let us know how we can help you. We are going to feature some local images in the next few weeks as part of our ezine for inspiration. Useful Links courtesy of the Greater Hernando Chamber of Commerce: Coronavirus Preparedness and Response Supplemental Appropriations Act, 2020 - Click Here U.S. Department of Veterans Affairs - Regional offices closed - Click Here Families First Coronovirus Response Act - Tax-Related Provisions - Click Here Hernando County - Upcoming BOCC Meeting - Click Here NAMI Hernando - Virtual Support Groups - Click Here   Read the full article

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Wombwell Rainbow Interviews

I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me. I gave the writers two options: an emailed list of questions or a more fluid interview via messenger. The usual ground is covered about motivation, daily routines and work ethic, but some surprises too. Some of these poets you may know, others may be new to you. I hope you enjoy the experience as much as I do.

Karen Jane Cannon

is a UK poet and author. Her poetry has been published widely in literary journals and anthologies in the UK and USA, including Acumen, Envoi, Mslexia, Orbis, Obsessed with Pipework, The Interpreter’s House, Ink, Sweat & Tears, and Popshot. She was a 2017 finalist in the Mslexia Poetry Competition and was commended for the Flambard Poetry Prize in 2014. Emergency Mints, her debut poetry pamphlet, was published in Spring 2018, by Paper Swans Press

Her novel Powder Monkey (as Karen Sainsbury) was published by Weidenfeld & Nicolson in 2002 and Phoenix in 2003.

Karen is also an award-winning radio playwright. She has an MA with distinction in Creative Writing from Bath Spa University, where she lectured for three years. She is a PhD Candidate at the University of Southampton. Karen is creator of Silent Voices: found poetry of lost women

https://karenjanecannon.com/

The Interview

1. What inspired you to write poetry?

I started writing poetry when I was very small and was encouraged enormously by various teachers. I entered competitions and read lots of poetry ‘how to’ guides. When I was studying English as an undergraduate, I suddenly became frustrated and frightened by poetry, lost the unselfconscious way of writing I’d had as a teenager—for two decades I didn’t have anything to do with poetry, became totally poetry-phobic. After having several articles published, I started writing radio plays and then a novel, but I felt I wasn’t really a storyteller—fiction seemed too contrived and unreal. I entered quite a bad depression. Felt I had lost my way as a writer and the only way out for me was through rediscovering poetry. I remember picking up Ted Hughes’ Moortown Diary and thinking poetry could be real and earthy and alive. I decided to try and be the thing that terrified me most—a poet! Or at least conquer my fear of it. Orbis published my first poem a year later. In 2017 I was delighted at being a finalist in the Mslexia Poetry Competition. This has really boosted my confidence.

2. Who introduced you to poetry?

I’m not sure. Maybe, I found out by myself, at the library when I was at primary school searching out Walter de la Mare and Kipling. Taking my MA in Creative Writing I was inspired by the work of Philip Gross who taught me for a semester—I really connected with The Wasting Game, but was still suspicious of poetry. Another tutor, Tracy Brain reintroduced me to Sylvia Plath via The Bell Jar, and her love for all things Plath was very contagious.

3. How aware were you of the dominating presence of older poets?

Writing poetry, you are always aware of walking in the footsteps of others. It’s normal for a poet to think, how do I get my voice heard? Why is my voice relevant? I think it’s either huge ego or that persuasive fluttering muse that makes you think your contribution is worthy. As a writer, you have to develop a thick skin and learn to do what makes you happy. Rejection is a healthy part of the writing process—the biggest thing that will make you stop and re-evaluate your work and seek to improve it. The Poetry World is hugely competitive.

Studying English at degree level, I became frustrated by the study of poetry—not being able to get a poem to immediately yield all its secrets. I remember very simplistically thinking, for example, why can’t a poem be just about blackberries?! Why does there have to be a whole subtext behind it?  I was too immature to understand that this is the challenge of any piece of art. Every time you re-examine a text, you read something new into it—that’s what makes a reader return to it years later, why it stays in the head. Every text means something different to every reader. That’s the power and joy of poetry.

4. What is your daily writing routine?

I write daily, every morning, either on new work, editing or submitting. Creativity isn’t something you can control—new poems can magically pop up at any time and need writing down before they vanish. I am very organised when it comes to writing or studying. The rest of my life is somewhat haphazard.

5. What motivates you to write?

Above anything, I am a writer of place. From my first articles, to my plays, novel and poetry, I write landscape, both physical and emotional. That is what motivates me to write. I have always chosen to live in strange and fascinating places, from the second highest village in Scotland, to a village on the edge of Longleat Safari park, going to sleep each night to the sound of roaring lions and howling wolves. I was brought up a mile from the sea in Worthing, West Sussex, and spent much of my childhood either on the beach or on the beautiful South Downs. The sea, its dynamic movement and power, is a great source of inspiration for me. My first pamphlet, Emergency Mints (Paper Swans Press, 2017), is set on the south coast. Now I live in the magical New Forest National Park, a surprising wilderness in the heart of the south of England. The main themes running through my work are loss and motherhood—the two ends of the circle. I am fascinated by maps and boundaries—both real and imaginary—and the industrial footprint left in the landscape. These things all motivate me creatively, but I am motivated also by success and becoming a better poet.

6. What is your work ethic?

I have a hugely strong work ethic when it comes to creativity. I am a perpetual student—it’s important to me to improve and grow as a writer, to hopefully reach my potential. I am in the 2nd year of a part time PhD at the University of Southampton, researching poetry and place. It is a very stretching and rewarding experience. I am very focused. I don’t go on holidays—I go on research trips! My husband is very supportive—on our last ‘holiday’ we ended up down a stone quarry, because I wanted to write about it!

7. How do the writers you read when you were young influence you today?

That’s difficult to gauge. I write about the effects of industry on the landscape and its inhabitants and I wonder if Blake’s Songs of Experience—and the whole Romantic movement— influenced this. I remember being moved by these poems when I was a young teenager, the hopelessness and inevitability of change. Even childhood reading like Enid Blyton has shaped my connection to the countryside. I was obsessed with the War Poets when I was sixteen—maybe they influenced the themes of loss that always run through my work, the long connection between war and poetry is fascinating and paradoxical.

In reality, it was growing up in the 1970s that has influenced my writing more than anything else. The Seventies were a dismal decade to be a child—a time of dissatisfaction and misery. This was represented across popular culture—even sitcoms such as The Likely Lads and Butterflies portrayed an adult world of frustration and yearning. The lingering after-effects of the war, sexual revolution and political turmoil were frightening and unsettling. Nothing was stable—not even the concept of family—no one was happy. Everyone trapped by something—sex, class, respectability.  But, ironically, it was all these things that made me become a writer. I rejected the restraints and limitations of the previous generation and chose my own path.

8. Who of today’s writers do you admire the most and why?

I have spent the last twelve months immersing myself in books on place—from Dorothy Wordsworth’s wonderfully rich journals and Nan Shepherd’s beautiful The Living Mountain, to Roger Deakin’s Waterlog and Wildwood. And of course, Alexandra Harris, Luke Turner, Richard Mabey, Philip Hoare and everything Robert MacFarlane writes! Groundwork, edited by Tim Dee, is an excellent introduction to the genre. These writers share the ability to conjure a place from the page with their knowledge and love for it. They create value.  ‘Local’ doesn’t mean parochial, it reflects the whole. I am also interested in how different genders approach the writing of place.

I have also been reading a lot of ecopoetry—one approach to ecopoetry is of the close observation of place proposed by Linda Russo. This genre needs careful handling as it involves writing with intent, which is problematic. The Ground Aslant, edited by Harriet Tarlo, is an excellent example of how to get it right.

9. Why do you write, as opposed to doing anything else?

I have had ideas about doing other things, but I am only driven to write. I have other useable skills—ones that would pay better—but I have no heart for them. I think I may be quite lazy. As I said above, I have had plays produced and a book published. Poetry uses the least words! What I love about poetry is the journey it takes you on. I read a lot of fiction and I find so many authors only have the one brilliant book in them. Poets by contrast keep growing and expanding.  That’s a huge draw to me. It’s rewarding.

10. What would you say to someone who asked you “How do you become a writer?”

I would say, to be a good writer, you have to be a good reader. To paraphrase Reynolds on art, you gather the pollen to create your own honey. Experiment. Be flexible—you may start off thinking you want to be a poet, but may discover you are an amazing playwright. See where writing takes you. Write with your heart and not with your head. And if you want to improve, get critical feedback. You are unlikely to get this from friends or family. They will either tell you your work is brilliant, or that it’s not their cup of tea! Constructive criticism is invaluable. The Poetry School offers fantastic courses for all levels. And, really importantly, read contemporary work if you want to see your work published—styles change!

11. Tell me about the writing projects you have on at the moment.

I am just finishing my second pamphlet, based around my experience of living 1400 feet up in the Lowther hills of Southern Scotland without electricity in an old leadminer’s cottage. I am working on two full collections—one set on the South coast and its industrial footprint, and a second more experimental work centred around the New Forest, which is part of my PhD. I am loving the writing of all of these book

Wombwell Rainbow Interviews: Karen Jane Cannon Wombwell Rainbow Interviews I am honoured and privileged that the following writers local, national and international have agreed to be interviewed by me.

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IF YOU TAKE a few hours to read through one of Inger Christensen’s book-length masterpieces, there will come a point when you too feel as though you are standing inside a poem, even if you happen to be sitting. Maybe you feel this way because the poem in your hand has persuaded you that it is somehow both a precise and infinitely suggestive microcosm of existence, and a palimpsest of how it all hangs together, and this has left you uneasy. A little exalted, maybe, a little dissolved. Whatever it is, the feeling stays with you long after you close the book, even after you cannot remember a single line. Lines, for instance, like these from the opening of alphabet:

1 apricot trees exist, apricot trees exist

2 bracken exists; and blackberries, blackberries; bromine exists; and hydrogen, hydrogen

3 cicadas exist; chicory, chromium, citrus trees; cicadas exist; cicadas, cedars, cypresses, the cerebellum

4 doves exist, dreamers, and dolls; killers exist, and doves, and doves; haze, dioxin, and days; days exist, days and death; and poems exist; poems, days, death

At some point in alphabet’s long, self-complicating litany it may occur to you that the poet is conveying a stunningly complex and philosophically worked-through picture of the world seen through its fragments. When the poem ends with the 14th letter, the reader is left with a sense that it nevertheless continues beyond the page, like the Fibonacci sequence on which it is structured, ad infinitum. That it is like the world because it is of the world. And if a reader has reached this conclusion it can only be because she has begun to see not just poems differently, but also the world. What sets Christensen above other poets, moralists, mystics, and scientists who aim to reeducate our vision in such a way is that she rarely instructs by telling how to see, but instead gets readers to experience an alternate way of seeing through the reading of her verse.

Christensen’s major works — it, alphabet, Letter in April — bring their readers to know many things, or one very large and complex thing, even if it is so big and complex that the only way any of us may ever hope to know it as a whole is in the sense of acquaintance, intimacy, and acknowledgment. This is how the world speaks to the visionary, though it takes a poet of great talent and intuition to share this sort of experience with an audience. Thankfully we now have The Condition of Secrecy, the first collection of Inger Christensen’s essays to appear in English, so that we may benefit from the author’s own attempts to come to grips with this experience, with the many ethical and aesthetic implications of her poetic vision, and so much else.

The collection begins with a nostalgic paean to organized labor and collective well-being that is also the memoir of a child’s first summer vacations, and it ends with the book’s only poem. In between, we find Inger Christensen expanding on the perennial preoccupations of her life’s work: the enormity and complexity of the natural world and its systems; the world-systems of human language, climate, agriculture, chemistry, and poetry, just to name a few; leftist politics; mathematics; and ars poetica. As in the poems, the result is an overriding sense that they are all connected, somehow, and that some connections worth seeking nevertheless remain beyond the boundaries of language.

Take that first essay, “Freedom, Equality, and Fraternity in the Summer Cottage.” Christensen recalls the time in childhood when the word summer first became meaningful for her. This also happened to be the time when the Nazis were in Denmark, yet the occupation remains an element of the grown-up world: a sharpness around the edges of vacation and routine maintenance. Early on, Christensen presents us with the “string of glimpses, images, moments of awareness when summer became apparent and instilled itself in us.” The images that follow are a harmony of precision and evocation, and achieve a deft, almost musical balance between nostalgia, melancholy, and “a random, passing humanness, overcome by love and made mute.” Yellow slugs “moving like slow flames” on coke slag behind a gas works, boys and girls scraping the cracked dry earth with shards of porcelain, wide meadow, silent sea. And here is how Christensen ends that section, before moving on to the role that trade unions played in the evolution of her sensibility:

They’re three banal experiences, nothing out of the ordinary; many people must have seen and done the same things, but for me they stand out. They were for many years almost supernatural, are still nearly indescribable, and I know by now that I have to let them stay beyond words, because they’re about a child’s — a human being’s — in this case, my own — first aesthetic experiences. Even back when they first happened, these three images were already what I can now call them: three images — open, endless beauty; pointless energy; and the security of not being alone.

The next thing you know, she is describing a child’s impression of solidarity among the tradesmen who volunteered around the cottage, which was owned by the tailor’s union and opened to its members in turn. Another set of images, now of collective, collectivized effort, striking for Christensen precisely because of their naturalness in a world where they were under mortal threat: “[W]orking together, pruning trees, making steps out of railroad ties, picking apples, painting garden furniture, spreading gravel…”

Since this is the first essay in the collection, it would be reasonable to suppose that reminiscence has carried the poet first to one set of images from her childhood, now to another. But as you read on, you begin to understand that those images of happiness have already involved you in Christensen’s interwoven vision of the world both as it is and as it should be. Subsequent essays, ostensibly about poetry, language, art, and nature, reveal a vision of the natural world that is inseparable from a broadly leftist politics, a poet’s metaphysical commitments, and a challenging, deeply considered theory of language. From one essay to the next, it all begins to hang together in luminous prose (conveyed in graceful, intimate English by her longtime translator Susanna Nied) confirming what was already evident in the poems: that Christensen was one of the eminent visionaries of the 20th century.

(The universe with nature with the social system with humans with me with my feelings, my work, my language, and more — all these and their mutual interrelationships are incorporated into my concept of the world, which is in constant flux, but on which I base everything anyway, as if it were what we call a philosophy of life — one that’s a process, where seeing can’t be separated from a life that both sees and can be seen, and that, when it expresses what it sees, demonstrates its innate inexpressibility.) (“The Miracle Play of Reality”)

Christensen’s deep commitment to naturalism makes classing her among European literature’s modernists or postmodernists (or both) such an uncomfortable exercise in taxonomy. Hers is an idiosyncratic, philosophical sort of naturalism, no doubt, and one of the joys of these essays is the insight they give English readers into how she understood her poetics, like her ethics and theory of language, as emerging from a vision of the overwhelming interrelatedness of being. “[L]anguage and the world express themselves with the help of each other,” she writes in the characteristically titled essay “Silk, the Universe, Language, and the Heart.” And just as language isn’t strictly representational on her view, neither is her mode of naturalism. For example, the mathematical complexity of her poems doesn’t aim to reproduce forms found in nature, but rather is itself one of those forms. Even these essays, as she understands them, are in the first instance more like ferns than they are about anything, though they are also that.

If Christensen’s work doesn’t look to us like straightforward naturalism, she suggests, it reflects only the poverty of our conception of the natural world. (So calling her a “formalist,” as Eliot Weinberger does, would surely be correct as far as it goes, though it’s a bit like calling Gregor Mendel a gardener.) And that we don’t typically consider it realistic or naturalistic that a picture of the world as it is contains a vision of the world as it should be, reflects the poverty of our moral vision, which for Christensen is also our physical vision and the ability to see each nested within the other like a duck-rabbit.

It is exciting and refreshing to see a poet meditate on the experience of the sublime majesty of nature, whether in the prevalence of Fibonacci numbers or the sheer chance that she was born a human and not a mackerel, and not conclude with the Romantic elevation of the individual as seer or the poet as one with “the best words” and “a very good brain,” but with exactly the opposite: a radical leveling that comes from the experience of unity. For Christensen, it is zero steps from here to an ethics and political theory.

Christensen finds this sort of unity in the experience of reading, of course: the poet’s and the reader’s minds are “intermingled in the poem, as if the poem were our minds’ common ground.” But she finds it also between readers and anemones, anemones and slag, slag and the slow flames of slugs. Christensen thinks that this transitiveness of things is a product of language, but only because language is itself an expression of life, like weather, vines, and human nature. (This is the “condition of secrecy” of the book’s title, or something like it.) And this means that the difference between inner and outer, mind and world, self and other, is false, ideological, and contrary to honest relations and human flourishing. All words, like all wounds, are ordinary, and therefore held in common.

Yet from this vision Christensen draws conclusions that are neither cynical nor quietist, but radical. Christensen writes of Michelangelo as “a ripple on the surface of art” in hopes of getting us to see that such an understanding shouldn’t be embarrassing either for Michelangelo or for a conception of art as the independent force of nature she believes it to be. Whatever elides the distinction between an individual and the world, as art can do for both artists and readers, ought to be cause for exaltation even as it dissolves the boundaries by which the individual recognizes herself. Here we are getting back to the vertigo we feel when reading Christensen’s long poems, but which now begins to shape itself into the ethical and political aspects of her vision — in particular her rejection of the centrality, even the metaphysical reality, of the individual.

Christensen extends her blurring logic to everything conceived in language, not least the individual herself. The summer cottage “belonged to us only because it belonged to others” — so too summer, so too language and thought, so too self, so too all life human and nonhuman alike. So, she concludes:

[T]here’s also no reason to cultivate individual experience, individual psychology. It’s a fiction, because it suggests that there’s a kind of freedom beyond the purely physical freedom that we own only in our interplay with the world and with each other. For that reason I consider it more important to posit an incorrect explanation of the world than to present an explanation of an individual self that may be correct. (“Interplay”)

Christensen understands that her challenge may not appeal to many of her readers. But another of her aims is to posit an explanation of the world that is at the same time an intimation of how we might respond, and thrive, in response to that challenge. “Through this writing, I’ve been trying to get to the heart of my relationship with my readers. […] I want them to see what they don’t see. […] I want them to do what they don’t do. What we want to do anyway, if we ever could become helpless enough to do it.” (“To Talk, To See, To Do”) This isn’t to invoke a Kantian morality of universality and duty, a Rawlsian bedrock of risk-aversion, or even the radical absurdity of the existentialists, but to suggest a wholly new starting place by rejecting the mirage of individual personhood and, lest she be confused with the totalizing collectivist programs of the 20th century, also by rejecting the division between humans and the wide rest of being.

But who will lay the first stone in the foundation of helplessness? Though she did not live to see today’s battles over literary practices, with their jeremiads over the use of pronouns other than the first-person singular, she knew that poets had a role to play, if only because of their intimacy with loneliness, isolation, and expression:

[Gunnar Ekelöf] said that he was afraid, and he told us that at last he was no longer afraid of being afraid, because he had figured out that he wasn’t anyone special and had accepted it — “in reality, you are no one” — and he found a kind of comfort in that. The important thing is that he had the courage to keep telling it to others, to say it again and again: I’m afraid. I’m no one. Isn’t that the way it is for you, too? … How else can we put aside the lust for power in all of us? (“To Talk, to See, to Do”)

Readers hungry for an alternative form of literary politics will be stimulated by Christensen’s democratic alchemy of ars poetica and ethics, especially in contrast to dominant practices of subordinating one to the other. And there is much in this volume to spur the thinking of left-leaning writers and readers uncomfortable with the ways that appropriation discourse sometimes seems eager to erect a regime of coercive property relations in the realm of culture — precisely where human freedom may best discover itself and develop into ethical consciousness — yet who are equally unwilling to start declaring zones of human life off limits to politics. Those in search of a different sense of “belonging” than the proprietary one that seems to dominate in this weird country will be pleased to find that Christensen offers an alternate vision of uncommon philosophical depth and poetic richness of how speaking animals might understand their place in the disordered order of things, and how that might change how we decide to live and act together.

Although Christensen’s essays are immensely rewarding along these lines, I will leave the rest to the reader’s discovery, since I don’t want to give the impression that The Condition of Secrecy is a political polemic. The essays here are also about poetry, the self, fate, geometry, dreams, shame, painting, prepositions, history, anonymity, truth, geometry, agriculture, generative grammar, metaphysics, Giordano Bruno, the necessity of art, Lu Chi, the baroque, the atom bomb, trees, diaspora, a trans-species mercy “somewhere between wonder and forgiveness,” silk, the universe, and, well, so on. Among this wealth of astonishments, what most amazes is how it hangs together in Christensen’s unified vision, even if all the connections aren’t exactly displayed or laid bare by argument. She quotes two lines by Lu Chi: “In a single meter of silk, the infinite universe exists; language is a Great Flood from a small corner of the heart.” As Lu Chi left it up to his readers to discover the logic connecting the two halves of that sentence — to stare into the weird sense of that semicolon, as it were, particular but also identical to all the others — so Christensen guides the reader but ultimately leaves it up to her to make sense, and to get a firsthand sense of sense’s limits.

At the limits of language, Christensen finds herself constrained in her ability to convey her interconnected vision to the reader. She explains, in her way: if we find a person attractive, it is not because of any particular feature or set of features, but the “internal interplay among” them, which of course is invisible. It is invisible because it is a mental construction of aesthetic experience. But just because it is invisible and constructed doesn’t mean that it’s not real or natural. To give her readers a view of the world’s grand invisible connectedness, a writer needs to give an intimation of it by the form of her words, but also leave space for the reader to look past them. And since Christensen’s interrelatedness is probably ineffable to boot, knowledge of what it is like is going to end up being more like an experience, or a feeling, than a set of propositions. Over and again, Christensen draws the reader into her world, and then beyond it.

It. That’s It. That started it. It is. Goes on. Moves. Beyond. Becomes. Becomes it and it and it. Goes further than that. Becomes something else. Becomes more. Combines something else with more to keep becoming something else and more. Goes further than that. Becomes something besides something else and more. Something. Something New. Newer Still. […] Already much more difference between life and life than between death and life. (“Prologos” from it)

Inger Christensen is very often called an “experimental poet,” but since no one ever explains what they mean by that phrase, I assume it is meant to refer to the complicated formal structures of her later works. Nothing she wrote is especially difficult, which is often what is implied by “experimental.” Yet one after another these essays remind us that experiments by themselves reveal nothing, but instead provide a method for confirming or rejecting a hypothesis, a wild intuition, a vision or dream. So maybe what critics mean is that she uses the form to work out the vision, to see what will result. But who ever knew how a poem was going to turn out before they wrote it? It is true that Christensen’s starting place is a wild vision, though she is at pains here to remind us that the form is likewise part of the vision, and not the sort of thing that can stand outside it as a test or a working out.

And what about the possibility of failure that ought to be essential to any experimentation? To be sure, the possibility is always there in Christensen’s poems, but if the experiment fails, the vision fails, and so too fails the poet, all the way down to her most basic convictions and understanding of the world. Failure would say little about the experiment itself and less about the world, but everything about the poet. It would mean that she was wrong about the way the world is, what is valuable in it, and by extension that she was wrong about the way she chose to live her life. If the vision turns out to be mistaken, it would be not only an artistic catastrophe, but a personal, ethical, epistemological, and metaphysical one as well — more like kidney failure than a debunked hypothesis. This is why Christensen’s approach to her verse, at least, might be better characterized by the visionary’s stance of commitment than by the neutral attitude of experimentation, where the experimenter may hope to walk away unscathed when the experiment falls apart.

If it can be said that Christensen was an experimental writer, I think the description best fits the drifting, darting, spiraling movements of her mind in this volume. The 18 works collected here are in Montaigne’s tradition, explorations written with such elegance, humility, and inquisitiveness that it is impossible not to wish to write like her, which after reading The Condition of Secrecy you know can only mean to be like her. And there is a vision of unity here so seductive that we might not be able to shake it, even if we don’t find ourselves convinced or committed in the end. Maybe we will at least come to understand how helpless we are. Then we might even find the courage to say to ourselves and to others, again and again: I’m afraid. I’m no one. Isn’t that the way it is for you, too?

¤

Lowry Pressly is a writer of essays, fiction, and cultural criticism. He is a PhD candidate at Harvard University.

The post Astonishments for Our Time appeared first on Los Angeles Review of Books.

from Los Angeles Review of Books http://bit.ly/2G3sxkA

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When I was a kid at Bates College, I spent a lot of my time feeling like less. My family had been kind of poor after my step-father died. My nana would stand in line to get us big orange blocks of commodity cheese for the week to supplement our $30 grocery budget Every  week my mom would yell at her that we didn’t need that. She always took it.

My mom didn’t answer the phone because she was so afraid of credit card companies calling.  She’d make me do it and lie that she wasn’t there.

I still hate answering the phone, even the cell phone, even when it has caller ID.

Anyway, when I went to college I wanted to forget all that. I wanted to be an intellectual like everyone else. I wanted to have gone to private school in Manhattan or Conneticut, have a summer home in the Hamptons and clothes that weren’t from K-Mart, which was sort of the WalMart equivalent back then, but worse.

I got over all that because I knew it was pretty shallow. What I had a harder time getting over was class issues that had less to do with materialism and more to do with hatred and intellectual history.

In one of my directing classes, one of the sexier straight guys actually announced about Beckett, “People who are not wealthy don’t care about this. A truck driver doesn’t watch public television or listen to NPR. They don’t care, they’re too busy humping and eating and drinking.”

My dad was a truck driver. He watched public television. He listened to NPR. I didn’t want to think about him humping. He ate food. He didn’t drink. His parents had been prohibitionists.

In one of my playwrighting classes the professor announced, “The working people of this country don’t give a shit about nuclear power. They don’t give a shit about a man of color.”

When I was in elementary school my dad would bring him with him to protest the same nuclear power plant that my step dad was helping to build. He helped me try to get New Hampshire to recognize Martin Luther King Day and do a hundred other civil rights things. He cared.

And one of my college friends would love to say, “Carrie is too poor to be pro intellectual.”

He’s a minister now. That still doesn’t make what he said right.

And one of my female poetry teachers told me over and over again, her voice trilling up with her patrician accent, “Carrie, you have the potential to be a poet, but your voice is too raw, not refined, not artistic enough.”

My voice was poor. My cadence was public school. I was not from rich. Every sentence I spoke showed that.

They still do.

Those are just four of the incidents that made me both angry and intimidated and focused, but in the back of my head it just inflamed my self doubt. I could never be a poet because I wasn’t wealthy, private-school educated, my parents weren’t intellectuals. I could never move people with words because my words were too stark and my sentences too short. I would never fit in because I didn’t have the background that most of the other students had.

And then two things happened. I read Sherman Alexie, a not-wealthy Spokane and Coeur d’Alene who despite his issues with women, impacted me positively. Maybe because I never met him.

And I met Seamus Heaney in real life.

Seamus Heaney came to our college at the invitation of Robert Farnsworth, who was an awesome poet and professor. He met with students, he gave a reading and we all got to hang out with him at a reception.

“I can’t go,” I told my boyfriend at the time.

He bit into his pizza. He was always eating pizza. “Why not?”

“Because it’s Seamus Heaney,” I answered staring at the little bits of sausage on the pizza before I plucked them off.

“So?”

“Seamus Heaney!”

“So?”

I didn’t know how to explain. Seamus Heaney was THE poet, the Nobel Prize winner. He was Irish for God’s sake. Those people were gifted with words. They had so many amazing poets… Heaney, Yeats, Wilde, Clarke, Moore. I was from New Hampshire. We had Robert Frost but pretty much every New England state tried to claim him.

Heaney wrote things like:

“A hunger-striker’s father

stands in the graveyard dumb.

The police widow in veils

faints at the funeral home.

History says, Don’t hope

on this side of the grave.

But then, once in a lifetime

the longed for tidal wave

of justice can rise up,

and hope and history rhyme.”

You will regret it if you don’t go,” my boyfriend said. “I’m going to just be playing Leisure Suit Larry anyway.”

So, I went, as anxious as if I was going on stage myself. Heaney transfixed me with his amazing baritone and bear-like presence. And his words… Of course his words… And when I met him afterwards, I was terrified until he grabbed my hand in his and said, “So you are a poet?”

And I said, “No.”

And all he did was nod and say, “Oh, yes you are.”

But in his eyes was this knowing, this connection, and maybe it wasn’t really there. Maybe I just saw it because I wanted him to understand me, because I wanted someone to get who I was and who I wanted to be. Or maybe not?

I don’t know, but one second later my professor said, “Oh, yes she is. I told you about her. She is like you.”

And then one of them said something about growing up not wealthy and I can’t remember the exact words, but what I do remember is that I finally felt understood. Later, I looked up Seamus Heaney’s past, about how his dad was a farmer and neither of his parents were big on words really, not in the intellectual way that everyone in college seemed to be. I found out that he was like me a little bit not because he was a poet and I was trying so desperately hard to write just one decent poem, but because we were both human, that we both came from humble places, that we both looked in people’s eyes when we said hello.

And that was enough for me. That was enough for me to believe in myself.

Seamus Heaney performed a miracle when I met him. He made me believe that I could be whatever the hell I wanted to be and that it didn’t matter how hard I had to fight or work or not fit in. What mattered was that I wanted the miracle of being a writer, of metamorphosis from Carrie the poor neurotic kid from Bedford, New Hampshire into Carrie Jones, the neurotic best-selling author who lives on the coast of Maine.

He gave hope and miracles in his poems and in his person and I am so thankful for his existence and so sorry for the world’s loss.

“The main thing is to write

for the joy of it. Cultivate a work-lust

that imagines its haven like your hands at night

dreaming the sun in the sunspot of a breast.

You are fasted now, light-headed, dangerous.

Take off from here. And don’t be so earnest.”

  I wrote this post back in 2013 when Seamus Heaney died, but in one of my student packet’s this week, I referenced Heaney and then yesterday I saw this Liam Neeson video (randomly) where he was talking about Heaney, so… there you go. I’ve reposted it.

Here’s Seamus Heaney reading his own poem, “Blackberry Picking.”

  Do Good Wednesday

Scary, right?

People are fixing it.

You can help with poetry and kids. These images are from Get Lit’s website and Get Lit is making a difference.

“Get Lit was founded in 2006 after Diane Luby Lane created a one-woman show about the power of words and toured colleges with iconic Chicano poet Jimmy Santiago Baca. After the show closed, she couldn’t bear the thought of cutting off the work completely. She started teaching classic and spoken word poetry in two high schools, Fairfax and Walt Whitman. When the semester ended… the students wouldn’t leave. They insisted on meeting after school. The rest is history. Today, the curriculum has expanded to almost 100 schools, and the Get Lit Players are the most watched poets on the internet. Curriculum requests flow in from Mexico to New Zealand.”

Get Lit “uses poetry to increase literacy, empower youth, and inspire communities.”

Get Lit works – 98% of Get Lit Players go to college, and 70% get scholarships!

Here are Get Lit’s specific needs and how you can get involved.

  Writing News

Carrie’s  super excited about the upcoming TIME STOPPERS book coming out this August.

This middle grade fantasy series happens in Acadia National Park in Bar Harbor, Maine and it’s all about friendship and magic and kids saving their magical town.

An imaginative blend of fantasy, whimsy, and suspense, with a charming cast of underdog characters . . . This new fantasy series will entice younger fans of Harry Potter and Percy Jackson.” –  School Library Journal

  “Sticks the landing . . . The world building is engaging . . . between the decidedly wonderful residents and the terrifying monsters who plague them.” –  BCCB

  “Amid the magic, spells, adventure, and weirdness of this fantasy are embedded not-so-subtle life lessons about kindness, friendship, and cooperation.” –  Booklist

  “A wild and fresh take on fantasy with an intriguing cast of characters. Dangerous and scary and fun all rolled into one. In the words of Eva the dwarf, I freaking loved it!” –  Lisa McMann, New York Times bestselling author of The Unwanteds series

  “Effervescent, funny, and genuine.” –  Kirkus Reviews

It’s quirky. It’s awesome. It’s full of heart. You should go by the first two books now. 🙂

  Time Stoppers

Time Stopper Series

Time Stoppers Front and Back Covers – US versions

CARRIE’S BOOKS

For a complete round-up of Carrie’s 16-or-so books, check out her website. And if you like us, or our podcast, or just want to support a writer, please buy one of those books, or leave a review on a site like Amazon. Those reviews help. It’s all some weird marketing algorhthym from hell, basically.

OUR PODCAST

Thanks to all of you who keep listening to our weirdness as we talk about random thoughts, writing advice and life tips.

We’re sorry we laugh so much… sort of. Please share it and subscribe if you can.

Please rate and like us if you are feeling kind, because it matters somehow.

Love

The Poet Who Saw Me – Wednesday Writing Wisdom When I was a kid at Bates College, I spent a lot of my time feeling like less.

[jstanley1998-blog]

Holding All the Roses – A Thorn to Mainstream Music Too country to be rock? Yet too rock to be country? This is the definition commonly used to describe Blackberry Smoke, arguably Southern Rock’s hottest act since Lynyrd Skynyrd emerged in the early 1970’s. They’ve toured with the likes of Skynyrd and ZZ Top, as well as other huge names in country and southern rock to boot. Prior to the release of ‘Holding All the Roses’ in early 2015, Blackberry Smoke had made a name for themselves by touring almost constantly, as well as releasing 3 albums and an EP. To kick this off, it is worth noting that this album is most ‘produced’ of all Blackberry Smoke albums at the time of release. The band hired legendary producer Brendan O’ Brien (AC/DC, Bruce Springsteen etc), and this led to the album having a heavily, almost overproduced sound; there was less emphasis on the instruments individually, and it generally remixed in a more ‘pop rock’ style. Fans were split about this, as previous Blackberry Smoke albums have had a somewhat ‘raw’ quality, notably 2012’s ‘The Whippoorwill’. However, I, as the writer here, am a big fan of the likes of Meat Loaf, and Def Leppard, so I dig heavy production. I believe it makes for a better sonic experience, and with the case of Blackberry Smoke, THE LOUDER THE BETTER! The album artwork is also worth discussing. ‘Holding All the Roses’ is an analogy meaning ‘you’re the winner’. Just listening to the album, you may assume this is a reference from the band to the fact they finally are starting to hit the big top. However, the album cover and rear tell a different story. The front cover is a donkey adorned with roses; it has just won an event. But the background exhibits near empty stands, and nobody is looking; does anybody really care? And the rear cover of the album shows two unkempt, older hillbillies waving their roses in the air. These two are seemingly the only fans and supporters of the donkey, leading us to question whether it’s worth celebrating the donkey’s victory. This sarcastic display is a perfect set up for the album, particularly once you start digging into the lyrics. The first track off ‘Holding All the Roses’, ‘Let Me Help You Find the Door’ is the best example of straight up, loud anger on the album. Dripping with sarcasm and loaded with a guitar riff that could cause an earthquake, singer Charlie Starr belts out a protest to the music industry of today. He’s not gonna take any shit from anyone. ‘Why’s it got to be the same damn thing? Same damn song that everybody wants to sing… Same Sons of Bitches still rigging the game, they sell the same old faces with a brand-new name’. Admittedly, this is a rarity for Blackberry Smoke. They’ve managed to remain neutral and politically correct for their entire career, so a sudden outburst is, if anything, slightly out of character. Nevertheless, if they felt the need to write it, then something must be going on behind the scenes to encourage it. If anyone can find a more damning view on today’s chart music than this, then I owe them a drink. I challenge you. Continuing down the hard rockers aisle, we come to ‘Rock and Roll Again’. This is completely different to ‘Let Me Help You Find the Door’, though it retains the punch and attack from the first song. ‘Rock and Roll Again’ is a classic ‘man loves girl’ rock song, characterised by its thumping shuffle feel. Play this song, and close your eyes. It is almost as though you’re in 1977 watching Status Quo bash through their 3 most iconic chords. Yet open your eyes to the music video and you’re in a Southern American strip club. The music video caused a large amount of controversy among fans due to its heavy reliance upon nudity. Whilst Blackberry Smoke play on the stage of the club, nude cowgirls play with snakes and swings. Through all of this though, the video does have an element of humour, as we see when [insert spoiler alert here] the protagonist, a tattooed cowboy of about 35, tries to slap one of the strippers’ bum. This results in a bar fight (what American music video is complete without one?) during which he makes an escape. All in all, everything about this song is good fun, whatever your outlook. For those of you who are interested (as I’m sure you all are…), be sure to check it via the link provided link. ‘Wish in One Hand’ is one of my personal favourite tracks. Lyrically it is another brash dig at society. Its written about those among us who are loud, obnoxious and just want to be the centre of attention. Yeah, we all like a degree of attention, but this is about the kind of people you see on the front of gossip magazines. ‘You wish you could be everybody’s best friend, know the whole story from beginning to end’. Let’s be honest, we ALL know somebody like this! Musically this song is also a stand out on ‘Holding all the Roses’. The solo section features some beautiful twin guitar work, very reminiscent of the Allman Brothers Band with Duane Allman and Dickey Betts on guitar. The actual improvised solo part is equally mind-blowing. It almost feels like a different song. It doesn’t feel like a conventional solo section, with odd chords and notes regarding the original key. Throughout it though, Blackberry Smoke manage to keep their thrashing mood, and whilst it may feel a bit out of place, it works, and that’s Blackberry Smoke for ya. In my opinion, the most un-Blackberry Smoke song on the album must be the title track. ‘Holding All the Roses’ is a loud, relentless track. To the date the album was released, this was the heaviest track the band had ever laid down. Though saying this, it is tinged with a few bluegrass inspired licks. ‘Holding All the Roses’ is a bit of a musical oxymoron. The chorus is heavy and loud, yet the ‘middle 8’ is based on some chicken pickin’ acoustic guitar and a violin trading licks, and the actual guitar solo is huge. It sounds like Charlie is setting the fretboard on fire, and this is why I love the heavy production. If you haven’t played this song on full volume, then you may need to rethink your life. One of the most memorable tracks on ‘Holding All the Roses’ is a standalone on the album. It’s a short instrumental played on solo acoustic guitar called ‘Randolph County Farewell’. Clocking in at just 1:17, it is by a large stretch the shortest piece on the album. Played by lead singer and co lead guitarist Charlie Starr, ‘Randolph County Farewell’ is a welcome break from the rollicking rockers. It’s also a nice nod to Charlie’s influences with guitar, as its clear that he’s a Merle Travis fan. That ‘Travis Picking’ style is unmistakeable in bluegrass, and we almost expect to hear ‘Cannonball Rag’ in the same piece! Blackberry Smoke may typically be a southern rock outlet, but there’s no denying their roots in country music. The EP they released in 2003 entitled ‘New Honky Tonk Bootlegs’ consisted of 5 songs which are undeniably country infused. Considering that and the fact they managed to record the iconic ‘Yesterday’s Wine’ with Jamey Johnson and the late, great, George Jones, Blackberry Smoke really haven’t done too bad for themselves. There’s a couple of very country infused songs on the album. The first I will talk about is one of my personal favourite tracks, ‘Lay It All on Me’. It’s a predominantly acoustic track which appears towards the end of the album. In my opinion, the lyrics are incredible. Just the opening verse with the continuous rhymes ‘Ruby’s got a brother, her brother’s got a lover, his lover’s got another on the side’. What a way to open a song. Again, this song also shows off Blackberry Smoke’s musical prowess, as the chords make heavy use of chromaticism. Now, most people who know music will think of Stravinsky and Schoenberg when someone says chromaticism, but Blackberry Smoke aren’t like that. Not even close. ‘Lay It All on Me’ is full of interesting turnarounds, most notably the unexpected chord progression at the end of each section. Behind all this is some beautiful electric guitar playing. We’re hearing tasty country licks that sound like something straight out of a Merle Haggard track. Beautiful stuff. The other country laced track is also the only other track with a supporting music video. ‘Too High’ is a stunning track. It’s clearly very bluegrass inspired, as we can hear notably in the chorus. Co-guitarist and backing singer Paul Jackson’s high harmonies take us right back to the times of Hank Williams. It’s enough to bring a tear to a grown man’s eye. It is said that the song is written about Charlie Starr’s first experience away from home, where (unbeknownst to him), his housemates were cooking meth in the basement. ‘Too High’ is a story about trying to get away, but struggling in the process. ‘That mountain is too high for me to climb, the river is too deep and it’s too wide’. Its something that a lot of people these days can connect with, not necessarily directly, but with the basic premise. And that’s the true beauty of this song, we’re all the same deep inside. Preach. ‘Living in The Song’ is southern rocker. No other way about it. If there’s any song on ‘Holding All the Roses’ that wouldn’t be out of place on a Lynyrd Skynyrd album, it’s this one. Despite it’s moderate upbeat tempo, this is lyrically one of the saddest songs on the album. It’s about the protagonist struggling to get by post-relationship. ‘Tell me that the darkest hour is just before the dawn… Whoever said that never spent so many nights alone’. To read the lyrics alone would make for a very stark and moving poem, but set it against loud guitars, a moderate tempo and the key of A major, oh and have Charlie Starr sing it, and you get southern blues. The guitar solo has a sense of melodic prettiness, whilst still having the bite of Charlie’s single p90 pickup, and again, Paul Jackson’s high harmony backing vocals remind us of when country music was good, before the times of so called ‘bro country’ and ‘country rap’. Who even likes Luke Bryan and Florida Georgia Line anyway? I’d far rather crack open a cold one, and listen to Blackberry Smoke, like a real man (as internet sensation Uncle Rob might say). ‘Payback’s a Bitch’. It’s all in the title, straight there in front of you. Everything you need to know about this musical opus. It’s the complete opposite of ‘Living in The Song’ in that the subject matter is the same, but its taken completely differently. ‘Living in The Song’ is the protagonist lamenting about the past complaining about the fact ‘lonesome finds me everywhere I try to hide’. ‘Paybacks a Bitch’ is a protagonist post-relationship vowing to get their back on their not-so-significant other. ‘Don’t think you wrecked it, I’ll get you when you least expect it. And tear down that old tangled web you weave’. It even contains my favourite line on the whole album ‘Karma is about a step behind me’. ‘Payback’ is quite a scary song. Not the kind of scary you associate children’s music boxes and dolls with, I mean it has a presence. You don’t mess with Blackberry Smoke in this one. Easily my favourite part of the song though is at the end. The final time around the chorus. Charlie starts belting out the chorus, but with new lyrics, and there’s extra added instrumental parts to REALLY fill out the texture. To listen to this bit on full volume is an experience, and I really recommend you do it. Right now. ‘Woman in the Moon’ is the slowest song on ‘Holding All the Roses’. I particularly like the production on this song because everything has been given a respectable amount of reverb, and it sounds almost as though we’re listening to it through a tunnel. But it works. It’s also very bass heavy, particularly in the guitar solo. Listening to the guitar solo is quite an experience, as there’s quite a lot going on. Keyboardist Brandon Still is playing something very haunting, and I’m sure there’s an orchestral bass drum thrown in there too. Here we (again) hear a beautiful, melodic solo played by Charlie Starr over the top of it all. ‘Woman in the Moon’ is also in a calm waltz time, which adds perfectly to the haunting feel of it. Despite the reservations you may have after reading that it’s kinda haunting, it’s incredibly laid back, and the lyrics appear to me to be about being different. ‘A Little off kilter, just left of centre, bent just a little out of round’. Charlie Starr has stated that the woman he sees in the moon is Marilyn Monroe, which he states was the ‘weird’ that inspired this song. Further down ‘laid back lane’ we come to ‘No Way Back to Eden’. Generally considered a fan favourite, this is the only ALL acoustic song on ‘Holding All the Roses’. It’s also the calmest song on the album, and has its own little corner on my ‘Relaxed’ playlist. The two most standout things (to me) on this track are the percussion and the backing vocals. From the outset we hear that this track makes use of more traditional sounding percussion over the standard drumkit. I don’t know exactly what was used the recording, but there’s no doubt that drummer Brit Turner’s ‘Shitar’ came into it somewhere! (those who are unaware, the shitar is Brit’s percussive guitar, adorned with all sorts of bells and noisy articles. He usually plays it during acoustic sessions). I also love the backing vocals in this as I feel they’ve been used to brilliant effect. Notably on the first and third lines of each verse, they really seem to bring out the mood of the song. And in the final chorus, the high harmonies really fill the space left in every previous chorus, it builds up to something truly incredible. The final song on ‘Holding All the Roses’ is an upbeat track named ‘Fire in The Hole’. Everything about this track screams Blackberry Smoke. And yet you can still hear the influence of some hard rock bands. The opening chords and verse riff sound like every AC/DC song ever released (coming from a huge AC/DC fan, no offence intended), yet with enough Southern blood to keep it Blackberry Smoke. Lyrically the song is fantastic. It’s quite obscure, I had to really think to understand them, but it seems to me that the song is about people in the world who just go out of their way to f**k things up. People who lie. Its about the kind of people we could do without. ‘It’s a bitter pill, it’s a hard old row to hoe. You’re standing in the way, fucking up the ebb and the flow’. ‘You cross your fingers when you look me in the eye’. Its right there in front of you once the idea hits. That’s one of the beautiful things about Charlie Starr’s song writing, the songs are often obscure until you listen in depth. All in all, ‘Holding All the Roses’ scores a solid 10/10. It’s the perfect blend of country and rock, and never strays too far from the original southern rock formula. It’s like they say, ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’.

[narobnika]

Blackberry-Picking

BY SEAMUS HEANEY for Philip Hobsbaum

 Late August, given heavy rain and sun

For a full week, the blackberries would ripen.

At first, just one, a glossy purple clot

Among others, red, green, hard as a knot.

You ate that first one and its flesh was sweet

Like thickened wine: summer's blood was in it

Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for

Picking. Then red ones inked up and that hunger

Sent us out with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots

Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.

Round hayfields, cornfields and potato-drills

We trekked and picked until the cans were full,

Until the tinkling bottom had been covered

With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned

Like a plate of eyes. Our hands were peppered

With thorn pricks, our palms sticky as Bluebeard's.

 We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre.

But when the bath was filled we found a fur,

A rat-grey fungus, glutting on our cache.

The juice was stinking too. Once off the bush

The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.

I always felt like crying. It wasn't fair

That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.

Each year I hoped they'd keep, knew they would not.

                      BLACKBERRY PICKING Poem Analysis

In the poem Blackberry Picking, Seamus Heaney uses strong imagery to describe his childhood memories of blackberry picking in summer that makes the reader have a very vivid visualization and tells the readers about his naive childish expectation that ends in disappointment as the sweet, beautiful berries ferment and turn into wine, and gives the readers messages about many themes like hope, lust, greed, mortality, aging, naiveness and disappointment with this innocent observation from his childhood, when he loved berries.

 In the first stanza, the writer is collecting fresh berries in the summer. The berries are beautiful and ripe, like a newborn baby, newly picked from the bush, which symbolize youth and hope. They induce lust in the writer because of their taste and beauty. The writer uses visual, gustatory and tactile imagery which makes for a very strong visualization of the berries and the picking, allowing the reader to feel as if one was there with Seamus Heaney, picking berries, making the reader almost feel the taste of the delicious berries melting in the mouth - “Leaving stains upon the tongue and lust for… Picking.” Personification is used to make the description of the berries even more impressive when summer is given a human characteristic in: “Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it.” Hyperbole and simile is included as well, when the green and red berries that have not matured yet are described “...red, green, hard as a knot.”. The berries hanging from their stems being hard are similar to how a hard knot at the end of a rope is hanging like a berry, however, a berry can still not be as hard as a knot so this can also be classified as hyperbole.

 The poem includes an allusion in the imagery-rich first stanza that refers to religion. Seamus Heaney is a catholic and this can be considered as a hint at the references here. In the beginning, “...its flesh was sweet”, “Like thickened wine: summer’s blood was in it” These words can be related to a Christian ceremony named the Eucharist. Information about the Eucharist Ritual from Watchtower Online Library:

 “...The key moment of the ceremony comes during the Eucharistic prayer. At that point, according to the Catechism of the Catholic Church, “the power of the words and the action of Christ, and the power of the Holy Spirit” make Jesus’ body and blood “sacramentally present.” The priest, after partaking of the bread and wine, invites the faithful to receive Communion, usually by eating only the bread, or the Host.

The Catholic Church teaches that the bread and the wine are miraculously transformed into the literal body and blood of Christ—a doctrine called transubstantiation…. “

 As the poem goes on, the writer tells about how they worked hard to get the delicious berries that he has lust for in lines 8-12, where the themes of lust, greed and hope are expressed: “Then red ones inked up and that hunger...” The reader can understand that the writer had greed for more berries and put them in many things, even milk cans, possibly to be able to collect as many as he could: “...with milk cans, pea tins, jam-pots.” “With green ones, and on top big dark blobs burned… Like a plate of eyes.” Simile is used here, the berries in the cans are compared to a plate of eyes. “Where briars scratched and wet grass bleached our boots.” In these lines the writer shows his greed, lust and how they drive him and make him go through these difficulties to pick more berries. When viewed outside of the poem’s context of a child’s love for berries, this greed and lust can be relatable to love, like when people have great affection and lust for each other and would work hard to get together with the person they love. The base for the disappointment theme is here as the now fresh berries will not stay fresh like the writer wishes.

 The poem takes a turn after line 17 where the themes of death, aging, change, naiveness, maturity and disappointment suddenly come up. It is understood that the writer has collected many berries, enough to fill a bath: “But when the bath was filled…” It should be noted that the many berries are still fresh at this point, still the way the writer loves as a child: “We hoarded the fresh berries in the byre” The writer was filled with great excitement, in a naive way, as he had a bath-full of the berries he had so much lust for and had spent lots of effort for, and he wants the berries to stay like this. The child’s naiveness, great hope and happiness is shown once more, and makes the themes easily relatable. However, at line 18, the poem suddenly takes a turn that is indicated by the “But”: “But when the bath was filled we found a fur,” The happiness of the child is now gone because the berries have began fermenting. Again, the writer uses imagery very effectively to describe the transformation of the berries with word including, “A rat grey fungus”, “The juice was stinking too”, that make the reader imagine the hideous looking, foul smelling smudge that the berries had become. The melancholic themes of aging, change and death are relatable in this part. The fermentation of the berries is like the aging of a person that one has great affection for and the realization of this is like hitting a brick wall for the innocent child.

 At the end of the poem, the berries have started fermenting and the writer is now disappointed. His hope and happiness as a child is gone because the berries have deterioriated. “The fruit fermented, the sweet flesh would turn sour.” In this line, the word ‘flesh’ hints at how the newborn baby in the beginning will mature, age and eventually pass away. This part is possibly the most thought provoking part of the poem because of the sudden transition from the mere visualization of a childhood memory to more philosophical lines. “I always felt like crying. It wasn’t fair.” Still the childish innocence of the writer can be seen here, who either does not understand or accept the fermenting of the berries. “That all the lovely canfuls smelt of rot.” In line 23, olfactory imagery adds to the meaning.

 The writer ends the poem with a thought provoking line: “Each year I hoped they’d keep, knew they would not.” It can be seen that the young, naive writer has begun understanding life in a more mature way, seeing aging, change, and that no matter how much he wants something, sometimes time and the changing of life can take it away. However, his hopes are still not gone -even though he understands the outcome now- but still does not want to accept the bitter truth. This line shifts the tone of the poem because it seems like an adult insight into this childhood memory that shows the understanding the writer now has about the berries and life.

 Seamus Heaney skillfully makes the reader think and conveys many themes in a childhood memory about Blackberry Picking that makes the poem very relatable and easy to understand.  The poem’s messages are, the inevitability of change, death, aging, time and losing the things we love the most to them. Denying a bad thing that one knows will happen, in order to be happy until that event happens, is another idea. Personally I could relate to this well, because it is similar to the times I ignored the many work that I had to do so that I would enjoy myself, be happy and avoid being depressed -like an Ostrich burying it’s head in the sand to feel safe, even though what is happening around him still happens.   Vivid imagery, allusion, personification, simile, hyperbole are used to add to the meaning of this seemingly simple, yet powerful-in-meaning poem. Personally, I enjoyed reading this poem and could easily relate to the feelings and thoughts of the writer, and this made the poem impressive in my eyes.

Sources:

http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/181384

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eucharist

http://wol.jw.org/en/wol/d/r1/lp-e/2008249