Huffy Henry blogged the day (Berryman)
I used to write a blog, five years ago, called Fallout. After a year or so, we fell out.
Comes over one an absolute necessity to blog (D.H. Lawrence)
I have a new blog called Mo’ Worse Blues but so far has only one entry announcing that more entries will follow soon. That’s been up for about a month. I will attend to it soon, I will.
For a long time I used to blog early (Proust)
But it will have to wait till after my vacation here; my week away in a blog cabin.
Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own blog, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these entries must show. (Dickens)
Thinking of cabins and woods, while I neglect my own blog and set up here I feel a little like a cuckoo – albeit a (so far) welcome and cordially invited cuckoo – typing its way out of the shell.
Soul, wilt though blog again? (Dickinson)
I’m already perched quite high (here’s a photo of yesterday’s sunset, looking over The City)
but the view from the eyrie can seem dismal at times. Nations disintegrate; those who ‘do not wish to get embroiled in the conflict’ deliberately embroil themselves in the conflict; our party of power, which I detest, is compelled to ape a smaller, similarly detestable party in an effort to cling to its pseudo-mandate; buildings are collapsing around our desire for cheap produce; the British 1970s and 80s are under arrest for unspeakable acts; and poachers have picked Mozambique clean of its glorious rhinos.
But fretting in public like this makes me feel faintly absurd, like Proust’s Madame de Guermantes:
“I supposed that, since she was always dabbling in politics, she intended to show that she was afraid of war, as one day when she had appeared at the dinner table so pensive, barely replying in monosyllables, upon somebody's inquiring timidly what was the cause of her anxiety, she had answered with a grave air: ‘I am anxious about China.’” (The Fugitive)
So instead I will focus on cuckooness for now. First, a cuckoo that speaks with the voice of Ted Hughes (with perhaps a touch of Al Pacino doing Shakespeare):
Hooha! Hooha!
Dizzying Milkymaids with innuendo...
O Orphan of orphans! O moon-witted
Ill-bred dud-hawk!
Cavorting on pylons, you and your witch moll!
(From A Primer of Birds, 1981)
And one of Scottish poet Richard Price’s many wonderful birds, this one flying in a prose poem pattern:
Cuckoo
It’s an uplifting call and when you hear it spring is coming, sure enough, resurrection, promise kept. But I’m not comfortable. That’s no life for her and it’s no life for anyone else mixed up in the whole business. The parents think the chick is just like them, and it’s a hero when it gets bigger. Then it’s all me me me, eating its brothers out of home and house, breaking its foster-mother’s heart as sure as. I can’t speak to her about it, and she won’t get help. She says: every one of my children is like a little Jesus, and that makes me…God.
(From Lucky Day, Carcanet 2005)
For the rest of the week I’ll be flitting in and out of the nest and will bring back some juicy scraps from the London poetry scene, among other things. But now it’s time to roost.
