something different

Something different today: a poem by Wallace Stevens called “A Rabbit As King Of The Ghosts”.

The difficulty to think at the end of day,
When the shapeless shadow covers the sun
And nothing is left except light on your fur—

There was the cat slopping its milk all day,
Fat cat, red tongue, green mind, white milk
And August the most peaceful month.

To be, in the grass, in the peacefullest time,
Without that monument of cat,
The cat forgotten on the moon;

And to feel that the light is a rabbit-light
In which everything is meant for you
And nothing need be explained;

Then there is nothing to think of. It comes of itself;
And east rushes west and west rushes down,
No matter. The grass is full

And full of yourself. The trees around are for you,
The whole of the wideness of night is for you,
A self that touches all edges,

You become a self that fills the four corners of night.
The red cat hides away in the fur-light
And there you are humped high, humped up,

You are humped higher and higher, black as stone—
You sit with your head like a carving in space
And the little green cat is a bug in the grass.

(from “Harmonium,” 1923)

Kinda cool eh? Read it a few times. Read it aloud.

I like that line “the whole of the wideness of night is for you”. In the more impressionable portions of my 4am training runs, I feel a little like that.

Running
12.something kilometres today, my usual double loop of the tan, plus some Anderson street reps thrown in to spice things up a touch.

Cake
Just in case you thought I’d suddenly gone high-brow or something, here’s something disgusting AND fattening: Would you eat this cake?

Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

pox

The new style is on hold today, I’m afraid. Much as I would like to serve up a beautiful example of trochaic tetrameter extolling the virtues of various running spots across Melbourne, I’m afraid it can’t be done.

“Why,” you ask? Well, mainly for one reason:

I’ve been gripped by some sort of pox or plague that has made running next to impossible. It’s most difficult to do the daily dozen when your nose is doing a slightly viscous impersonation of Niagara Falls and your chest feels like an acorn being stood on by an elephant.

When I say “elephant” I don’t mean one of those lithe schoolgirl-figured elephants you sometimes see, I mean a big one.

So, I’ve been sick, and in true male style I’ve been a complete sook about it; whining, moaning and generally spreading the love and/or snot around the place.

And I haven’t felt like reading anything serious. I got to the bit in Stephen Fry’s book about poems that are written so that they appear in a diamond shape on the page. I confess at the point I quailed, quaked and mentally did an impression of a Ricki Lake guest:

Enough!!! Talk to the hand, the face don’t wanna know

writ-
-ting a
poem that
looks a groovy
shape is the
stupidest
thing ev-
-er.

It’s the missing link between writing and soduku. Like the other missing link, it’s inarticulate, composed mostly of grunts and, if it had knuckles, would surely drag them along the ground.

A prize for the first person to write in the with the correct, technical name for that sort of poem.

new style

I didn’t run today because of rain
but deny strongly it was ’cause of pain
that dogged my hips and knee so much last May
and left my marathon in disarray

Notice anything yet? That’s right, no more prose, finely-crafted or otherwise, today I’m experimenting with the medium of poetry, or poesy as you might say if you were the kind of kid who got beaten up on the play-ground.

This has been inspired by a lovely book by Stephen Fry with, ironically for such a well written book, a name that is possibly the worst pun this side of Fleet street, The Ode Less Travelled. But, moving on:

Another story caught my eye today
Cockroaches, pigeons in a restaurant
in Chinatown. I’m terrified to say
I’ve had lunch there a few times and I thought
“it’s not so bad” (including Peking Duck
cooked in a kitchen smothered in black muck).

Whooo, this is hard work, this verse business. If you have some experience with this stuff, you’ll recognise the two snatches of doggerel above as iambic pentameter, admittedly of a fairly low standard and arguably slumping into the trochaic late in the piece.

Poetry, as you might expect from a pastime mostly concerned with words, has some wonderful jargon. It’s far better than running with its “intervals” and “fartlek” (ugly word). How about this:

alexandrine: A line of iambic hexameter, typically found in English as the last line of a Spenserian Stanza or similar pentametric verse arrangement

So now you know. Also:

anacreontics: Short-lined (often seven-syllable trochaics), celebrating erotic love, wine and pleasure.

and

ictus: the unit of stress within a foot

Use them at your next party, I’m sure you’ll impress your friends and acquaintances. Just be careful – ictus isn’t about your actual foot. It’s a poetic term.

It’s all very exciting. Tomorrow I might try something in the heptameter vein, or possibly hexameter or even haiku. Perhaps even some Gerard Manley Hopkins-style sprung rhythm, although I’ll probably only manage about one post a year, and that would be pretty much unintelligible.

sin

Km: Tuesday – 10, Wednesday, 11. For the week – 21

I can honestly say I’ve never spent much time reading ancient Sufi poetry. To be perfectly frank, I’ve never really felt like I was missing out until today. Well, in fact, until Monday night on the train home. I read the following quote, apparently by Sufi poet Mevlana Jelaluddin Rumi (circa 1200 ACE):

Come, Come whoever you are, wanderer, worshiper,
lover of leaving. Our’s is not a caravan of despair.
Come even if you have broken your vows a
thousand times, Come, come yet again.

I particularly like the second part of that verse, “even if you have broken your vows a thousand times, come”. It’s one of those observations that seems to have echoes in almost all facets of my life. Yes, including running.

I don’t have much of a talent for philosophical or spiritual rumination, and this probably isn’t the place for that anyway. Let’s just leave it as something to park at the back of my mind, where the important thinking happens.