Cultivarium

Afrikaans Writing: Guest Poet

2009-08-18T17:46:00.000-07:00

Afrikaanse Monster

Afrikaans is ‘n kwas wat herhinneringe van stowwerige plaaspaaie optower.
Dit kweek albasters wat met tyd ‘n marmer skynsel trotseer.
Die Karoo-taal bars en kraak tussen die voortrekkers se maaltande
en vertoef in die beker van die volkstong.
Afrikaans wek ‘n vreemde heimwee in ons,
openbaar ‘n skat helaas verbloem
en breek altoos deur soos die dag om weer te heers
Vanaf Jan van Riebeeck, kombuis-, kalbas-
Gaboen-, en geheimtaal.
Dit spreek tussen die lyne van etiket,
maar noem ‘n ding op sy naam:
sterk soos ‘n vuis, dog fyn soos ‘n bloeiseltjie
en rooi-wang perskes spruit vanuit hierdie blom.
Ons vir jou, Afrikaans.

Elmien Nell

More Modest Mouse

2009-08-18T17:41:00.000-07:00

I'm abusing my two blog spaced to evangelise about Modest Mouse.

We've been friends for years, but its suddenly grown into something more.

With Love: The Good Times Are Killing Me

If I Should Fall Behind

2009-07-12T11:48:00.000-07:00

We said we'd walk together, baby come what may
That come the twilight, should we lose our way
If as we're walkin, a hand should slip free
I'll wait for you
And should I fall behind
Wait for me.

We swore we'd travel, darlin side by side
We'd help each other stay in stride
But each lovers steps fall so differently
But I'll wait for you
And if I should fall behind
Wait for me

Now everyone dreams of a love lasting and true
But you and I know what this world can do
So lets make our steps clear that the other may see
And I'll wait for you
If I should fall behind
Wait for me

Now there's a beautiful river, in the valley ahead
There 'neath the oaks bough, soon we will be wed
Should we lose each other in the shadow of the evening trees
I'll wait for you
And should I fall behind
Wait for me
Darlin' I'll wait for you
Should I fall behind
Wait for me

Bruce Springsteen

Klaas Jonkheid's Murder

2009-07-11T07:29:00.000-07:00

I scan the internet hourly with searches like “Klaas Jonkheid murder latest”.
I am dissatisfied with everything that I read.
I can’t believe that I am writing ‘Jonkheid’ and ‘murder’ in the same phrase.
I have never known anyone who has been murdered, and never interrogated the word.
It is so different to ‘died’, even to ‘killed’: the word written to me in an email.
Klaas had been killed.
It wasn’t the right word: people are killed in car crashes and other accidents all the time.
A murder is a different thing, an immoveable thing, an act beyond reversal and without the mishap of accident.

Klaas would have understood my process: denial, bargaining, depression.
I would have found him patronizing.
I bargain with the internet every day, hoping to read something that will make the whole thing fall into place.
I am irritated with any group claiming his death as racist genocide or an indictment on national safety.
I haven’t faced up to the fact that context, even an eye-witness account or last words can’t undo what is done.
What is done, is the removal from the now of something and someone I took for granted.
A person so consistent in my landscape, so well established, that I had perceived them as invulnerable.

I am no stranger to the death of beloved friends.
And most of my friends are large personalities, ‘distinguished’ as the media insists he was, but not by accomplishment: by the willingness to live outside of what is accepted and acceptable, to live in a state of mental and spiritual youthfulness.
Klaas loved crisis, he loved it for its ability to renew.
He liked to use archetypes, ideas about fantasy and reality and other intellectual adventures I didn’t always trust.
For his own demons, Jack Daniels, his Harley and the voracious collection of obscure musicians connected him, I think, to the moment and to others.
I have him to thank for Nick Drake, Martha Wainwright, Regina Spektor, Ani diFranco, Imogen Heap, Brandi Carlile and countless other staples in my own music vocabulary.

I’ve been reading back through our intermittent, but consistent 5 year mail conversation, and found things that I had overlooked.
Klaas had loved The Little Prince.
I choose to remember him with words from the book:
“Only children know what they are looking for.”

Bird York and My Fan Video Fears

2009-07-05T04:59:00.000-07:00

After posting my petulant piece on the absence of a music video to the beautiful "Wicked Little High"by Bird York.
I received a mail from her 'webmaster', who I assume is her online media director / PR consultant.
I was really pleased to hear from her (Bird's representative), and she acknowledged the 'gap' in terms of a video for the song.
Part of our conversation included the possibility of a fan video (a reference I made in my post.)

I have always been terrified of fan videos, especially poorly put together scenes from Grey's Anatomy, or worse, entire pieces of beautiful music set to a still image of a C.D cover.
I decided to probe my aversion and YouTube'd my idea of one of the best pieces of music ever penned: Hallelujah, written by Leonard Cohen and sung by Jeff Buckley.
Unfortunately, I retrieved, the entire song as backdrop to the "love triangle" dramatized in Robin Hood (2006).
It was a physically and spiritually painful audio-visual experience.

Here is my dilemma: beautiful music does not belong to its author and can be expressed by a fan or listener that truly appreciates and respects its integrity. Unfortunately, in an age of instant self-publishing, discernment is a rarity.

I hope that anybody who feels the way that I do about Ms. York's music, had been moved by it, and doesn't seek to copy it, would spend the time crafting a worthy visual accompaniment to her song.

Please see Jeff Buckley's mishap: I regret to anticipate that many may enjoy it.

You Can Never Hold Back Spring

2009-07-03T13:49:00.000-07:00

The Confessional Poet At Home

2009-07-03T13:37:00.001-07:00

Kathleen 'Bird' York

2009-07-03T13:09:00.000-07:00

I can't bring myself to post the lyrics to 'Drawn To You' or 'Wicked Little High' as it is sometimes listed.

It has been the song of obsession for me for about 6 months, and I'd much prefer to share a video.

She hasn't made one.

There aren't even any passable fan video's of the song.

I can post a video of 'In The Deep', but its only my second favourite song: and its obviously very popular. I'm immediately dissuaded.

I'm stumped: can the internet, in its entirety, really have dried up in this instance?

I realise how much unearned media I take for granted.

Cigarettes And Whiskey And Wild, Wild Women

2009-07-03T12:32:00.000-07:00

(from a song)

Perhaps I was born kneeling,

born coughing on the long winter,

born expecting the kiss of mercy,

born with a passion for quickness

and yet, as things progressed,

I learned early about the stockade

or taken out, the fume of the enema.

By two or three I learned not to kneel,

not to expect, to plant my fires underground

where none but the dolls, perfect and awful,

could be whispered to or laid down to die.

Now that I have written many words,

and let out so many loves, for so many,

and been altogether what I always was—

a woman of excess, of zeal and greed,

I find the effort useless.

Do I not look in the mirror,

these days,

and see a drunken rat avert her eyes?

Do I not feel the hunger so acutely

that I would rather die than look

into its face?

I kneel once more,

in case mercy should come

in the nick of time.

Anne Sexton

Candy

2009-07-03T12:16:00.000-07:00

Springsteen's Wrestling Ballade

2009-02-23T09:13:00.001-08:00

A grainy tribute to Rourke's comeback.
I love this...

The Feel of Hands

2009-02-23T08:57:00.000-08:00

The hands explore tentatively,
two small live entities whose shapes
I have to guess at. They touch me
all, with the light of fingertips

testing each surface of each thing
found, timid as kittens with it.
I connect them with amusing
hands I have shaken by daylight.

There is a sudden transition:
they plunge together in a full-
formed single fury; they are grown
to cats, hunting without scruple;

they are expert and desperate.
I am in the dark. I wonder
when they grew up. It strikes me that
I do not know whose hands they are.

By Thom Gunn

The Hug

2009-02-23T08:33:00.001-08:00

It was your birthday, we had drunk and dined
Half of the night with our old friend
Who'd showed us in the end
To a bed I reached in one drunk stride.
Already I lay snug,
And drowsy with the wine dozed on one side.

I dozed, I slept. My sleep broke on a hug,
Suddenly, from behind,
In which the full lengths of our bodies pressed:
Your instep to my heel,
My shoulder-blades against your chest.
It was not sex, but I could feel
The whole strength of your bdoy set,
Or braced, to mine,
And locking me to you
As if we were still twenty-two
When our grand passion had not yet
Become familial.
My quick sleep had deleted all
Of intervening time and place.
I only knew
The stay of your secure firm dry embrace.

by Thom Gunn

Touch

2009-02-21T05:11:00.000-08:00

You are already
asleep. I lower
myself in next to
you, my skin slightly
numb with the restraint
of habits, the patina of
self, the black frost
of outsideness, so that even
unclothed, it is
a resilient chilly
hardness, a superficially
malleable, dead
rubbery texture.

You are a mound
of bedclothes, where the cat
in sleep braces
its paws against your
calf through the blankets,
and kneads each paw in turn.

Meanwhile and slowly
I feel a is it
my own warmth surfacing or
the ferment of your whole
body that in darkness beneath
the cover is stealing
bit by bit to break
down that chill.

You turn and
hold me tightly, do
you know who
I am or am I
your mother or
the nearest human being to
hold on to in a
dreamed pogrom.

What I, now loosened,
sink into is an old
big place, it is
there already, for
you are already
there, and the cat
got there before you,
it is hard to locate.
What is more, the place is
not found but seeps
from our touch in
continuous creation, dark
enclosing cocoon round
ourselves alone, dark
wide realm where we
walk with everyone.

by Thom Gunn

Leonard Cohen: "Love Is Not A Victory March"

2008-12-16T12:13:00.000-08:00

I have always loved Leonard Cohen's Hallelujah.

But not sung by him.

I like it sung by Rufus Wainwright, and I love it sung by Jeff Buckley.

The interpretations, though, are held together by the incredible lyric and the composition.

Something Cohen can be relied on for and why he supports covers like the gorgeous and graceful Madeleine Peyroux so successfully.

He grounds music in something so fundamental.

No bull and where its bull, its self-aware.

His lyric works hard to claim for itself a truth.

I feel nostalgia for things I haven't been through, because he talks to a feeling or a thing plainly enough to involve me.

Hallelujah – Leonard Cohen (from Leonard Cohen Live in Concert)

I've heard there was a secret chord
that David played, and it pleased the Lord
But you don't really care for music, Do you?
It goes like this, the fourth, the fifth
The minor Fall, The major lift,
The baffled king composing, hallelujah

Hallelujah (chorus)

Your faith was strong but you needed proof
You saw her bathing on the roof
Her beauty in the moonlight overthrew you
She tied you to a kitchen chair, she broke your throne
she cut your hair and from your lips she drew the halleujah

Hallelujah (chorus)

Maybe I've been here before
I know this room, I've walked this floor
I used to live alone before I knew you
I've seen your flag on the marble arch
love is not a victory march
it's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah

Hallelujah (chorus)

There was a time you let me know
What's real and going on below
but now you never show it to me, do you?
And remember when I moved in you
the holy dove was moving too
And every breath we drew was Hallelujah

Hallelujah (chorus)

Maybe there's a God above
And all I ever learned from love
Was how to shoot at someone who outdrew you
It's not a cry you can hear at night
It's not somebody who's seen the light
it's a cold and it's a broken Hallelujah

Hallelujah (chorus)

I've Come To Take You Home

2008-12-12T12:31:00.000-08:00

Driving through the beauty of Nature's Valley today, re-visiting a home of my own, I heard Diana Ferrus read her moving poem to Sarah Baartman on local radio.

A poem for Sarah Baartman
By Diana Ferrus

“I’ve come to take you home –
home, remember the veld?
the lush green grass beneath the big oak trees
the air is cool there and the sun does not burn.
I have made your bed at the foot of the hill,
your blankets are covered in buchu and mint,
the proteas stand in yellow and white
and the water in the stream chuckle sing-songs
as it hobbles along over little stones.

I have come to wretch you away –
away from the poking eyes
of the man-made monster
who lives in the dark
with his clutches of imperialism
who dissects your body bit by bit
who likens your soul to that of Satan
and declares himself the ultimate god!

I have come to soothe your heavy heart
I offer my bosom to your weary soul
I will cover your face with the palms of my hands
I will run my lips over lines in your neck
I will feast my eyes on the beauty of you
and I will sing for you
for I have come to bring you peace.

I have come to take you home
where the ancient mountains shout your name.
I have made your bed at the foot of the hill,
your blankets are covered in buchu and mint,
the proteas stand in yellow and white –
I have come to take you home
where I will sing for you
for you have brought me peace.”

Where Do You Go To My Lovely?

2008-12-10T05:13:00.000-08:00

Peter Sarstedt
Top of The Pops
1969

Also featured in the excellent Darjeeling Limited (Wes Anderson), 2007.

Clowns (Electric Proms '08)

2008-11-26T11:25:00.001-08:00

Goldfrapp

Gathering Mushrooms

2008-11-25T22:05:00.000-08:00

As he knelt by the grave of his mother and father
the taste of dill, or tarragon-
he could barely tell one from the other-

filled his mouth. It seemed as if he might smother.
Why should he be stricken
with grief, not for his mother and father,

but a woman slinking from the fur of a sea-otter
In Portland, Maine, or, yes, Portland, Oregon-

he could barely tell one from the other-

and why should he now savour
the tang of her, her little pickled gherkin,
as he knelt by the grave of his mother and father?

*

He looked about. He remembered her palaver
on how both earth and sky would darken-
'You could barely tell one from the other'-

while the Monarch butterflies passed over
in their milkweed-hunger: 'A wing-beat, some reckon,
may trigger off the mother and father

of all storms, striking your Irish Cliffs of Moher
with the force of a hurricane.'
Then: 'Milkweed and Monarch 'invented' each other.'

*

He looked about. Cow's-parsley in a samovar.
He'd mistaken his mother's name, 'Regan, ' for Anger';
as he knelt by the grave of his mother and father
he could barely tell one from the other.

Paul Muldoon

After Me Comes The Flood

2008-11-24T23:57:00.000-08:00

Regina Spektor

I Am In Need Of Music

2008-11-24T13:51:00.001-08:00

I am in need of music that would flow
Over my fretful, feeling fingertips,
Over my bitter-tainted, trembling lips,
With melody, deep, clear, and liquid-slow.
Oh, for the healing swaying, old and low,
Of some song sung to rest the tired dead,
A song to fall like water on my head,
And over quivering limbs, dream flushed to glow!

There is a magic made by melody:
A spell of rest, and quiet breath, and cool
Heart, that sinks through fading colors deep
To the subaqueous stillness of the sea,
And floats forever in a moon-green pool,
Held in the arms of rhythm and of sleep.

Elizabeth Bishop

Bon Iver Live On Jools Holland

2008-11-24T12:35:00.000-08:00

Bellwood

2008-11-23T22:57:00.000-08:00

She drives past bulls behind fences
to reach the cottages that
sit primly at the water’s edge.

Purple flowers adorn the dry hillside,
amethysts around a sun-burnt neck.

A pin oak extends delicately
towards the sky. Horses mull.

Earlier, on the open road her car flanked a train
as it probed the landscape, like a man entering a woman.

On her stereo, Alanis Morisette’s lyrics blare
‘this is in praise of the vulnerable man.’
The words summon his face like an avatar:
sad clear eyes, thin-lipped mouth, jutting nose
swimming up in her mind like insistent fish.

Hours later, drunk, she leaves the birthday party,
to walk to where she will sleep that night
and lies on her bed, listening to the sounds of frogs
calling out across the water.
Laughter floats in through her open window,
like a half-drawn breath.

She remembers his words about her poems:
earnest, direct, removed.
Offering structure, a skeleton beneath flesh.

She scrawls in her notebook as a swimmer, fearful, under water
might search the opacity for something recognisable.
She writes tentatively, as one standing up, walking to shore
might feel mud and soft lake moss beneath her feet, yielding.

Sarah Frost
http://writinginto.wordpress.com

Dream Song 1: Huffy Henry Hid The Day

2008-11-20T04:55:00.001-08:00

Huffy Henry hid the day,
unappeasable Henry sulked.
I see his point,—a trying to put things over.
It was the thought that they thought
they could do it made Henry wicked & away.
But he should have come out and talked.

All the world like a woolen lover
once did seem on Henry's side.
Then came a departure.
Thereafter nothing fell out as it might or ought.
I don't see how Henry, pried
open for all the world to see, survived.

What he has now to say is a long
wonder the world can bear & be.
Once in a sycamore I was glad
all at the top, and I sang.
Hard on the land wears the strong sea
and empty grows every bed.

John Berryman

Walking

2008-11-20T00:43:00.000-08:00

It is the middle of a morning by the lake.
I have come outside to sneak a childish cigarette
and am grateful alone
in the strengthening sun.

You want to go walking up a hill that sits
solid outpost,
flanking our holiday territory.

I want to walk,
to move my muscles in the cool and feel
the country against flesh and hair.

You look me stranger in the eye and declare the pace.
I leave myself down at the water’s edge.

Five brisk minutes along the flat red runway
and I am already playground panting: impossible.
Your calves tighten in strict half-moons
pumping the unstoppable machinery of your distance
into the stones and the rocks and the gathering dust.

Mandy Leontakianakis
November 2008

Delicate

2008-11-19T23:59:00.001-08:00

The Thought Fox

2008-11-19T23:55:00.001-08:00

I imagine this midnight moment's forest:
Something else is alive
Beside the clock's loneliness
And this blank page where my fingers move.

Through the window I see no star:
Something more near
Though deeper within darkness
Is entering the loneliness:

Cold, delicately as the dark snow
A fox's nose touches twig, leaf;
Two eyes serve a movement, that now
And again now, and now, and now

Sets neat prints into the snow
Between trees, and warily a lame
Shadow lags by stump and in hollow
Of a body that is bold to come

Across clearings, an eye,
A widening deepening greenness,
Brilliantly, concentratedly,
Coming about its own business

Till, with a sudden sharp hot stink of fox
It enters the dark hole of the head.
The window is starless still; the clock ticks,
The page is printed.

Ted Hughes

Paul Muldoon On Political Poetry and The Hazards of Writing A Daily Poem

2008-11-19T23:50:00.001-08:00

Haircut

2008-11-19T23:32:00.000-08:00

Cigarettes

2008-11-19T12:42:00.000-08:00

I remember when I was afraid of cigarettes:
the certainty that each one was killing
my father.
It was my struggle to make him see,
that they would take him
from me.

He stopped for seven years,
until his father died.
The news delivered too-loud
in a phone call from Greece.
Dad shouting to cover the distance:
he was so far from home.

He sat alone in our sun room that night,
listening to Theodorakis and crying.
A black and white photograph of my gandfather
and a brass ashtray at his side.
Fine smoke coated his vigil.

I tried to smoke fashionable cigarettes:
slim, white menthol fingers
redeeming my minutes
while I grappled with myself at the sea.

It took a year for the tobacco to take hold.
for the deep pull to reach my lungs
and soar into my brain.

A sacredness in my
pocket of personal smoke.

I tried to stop smoking
when a man said
it separated me from him.
And me from God.
For him I could be
a piece of nature.
A breath of fresh air.

I find smoking places: secret
on a narrow windowsill,
knees girlish close to my chest.
On a deep verandah,
starless quiet.
Before anyone else is awake:
gathering words for the day.
After everyone else is asleep:
remembering
and forgetting.

Mandy Leontakianakis
November 2008