A glimpse through the Glass

I wrote this when I was feeling so young and inexperienced after reading a book on collected poems from all the great writers. One poem by  Langston Hughes called 'Little Old Letter'. It was about a letter that he had received in the mail that had obviously brought bad news. It ends:

'Just a pencil and paper,

             You don't need no gun not knife

                                                                 A little old letter 

 Can take a persons's life '

I read it among the others while looking for inspiration but I found that I had no experiences to write of no great thoughts to tell, only the little old ones that others have thought a thousand times before me. I was feeling very small.

A book of poems
Lay on my desk
Until I gave my hand and read
My head told my heart it was lead

I was old; old was wise
Experience was mine
Then the lines came quickly
I read, they did not shout at me

But they robed me, these words
Of my experience
And the poem ended, like sleet
Youth came back to me bittersweet

I wrote another one soon after, with me poems come in twos or threes and all at once. :)

This is inspired by my FicSwap story which is a fairy tale.

A sheet of clear glass
Crystal-kike in clarity

Through it the eyes pass
From barren, bold austerity
To each golden rainbow coloured shape

The air appeared clean and fresh and bright
Blue rippled the water in its wake

There was no haze to dim the eye
But yet a veil lowered tween me and the dream
And the glass grew dim as from a sigh

And there you have it! Please feel free to critique, I need all the advise I can get, be merciless!! 

Wouldn't you love to have a room like this! 

It's a beautiful painting though I don't usually like this style. It's as if the painter was trying to express that the great wide ocean is his room. It is meaningful and intriguing because it doesn't have a stated meaning, the viewer can take his own interpretation of it for himself.

Secret Garden on Violin... 08/08/08 = Ben Chan's 26th B-Day!

I have a Violin!!!

   I have not written a new post for a while, longer than I thought. I have been busy working for my neighbour Annie with her horses and I had my 18th birthday on Monday. On Sunday we went sailing in my brothers boat and I lost my glasses overboard! Oh well, headaches for two weeks until my new ones come.

Star

But the best bit, and what is meant to be the main theme of this post, is that I got a violin for my birthday!! I have for a while thought about starting the violin, but only very recently had I decided to really play it. I was encouraged by the fiddle players in the band at the ceili we go to every month (that's Irish dancing which is similar to country dancing). I announced at the dinner table one night "I have decided I want to learn the violin!" I didn't know until my birthday, but Mum rang up Nan that very night and told her that that is what I would like for my birthday, and she went and bought one immediately, a very good one too. Nan is always encouraging her grandchildren to play instruments she taught us to play the recorder and some on the piano. So she is very glad I want to learn.
  I have tried playing it but I couldn't even get a sound out of it! But I think it is because I didn't rosin the bow properly. I have been looking at tutorials on YouTube and there are lots of helpful videos there. I will also be able to learn off Annie who my give me lessons in exchange for working with her horses. She has been playing most of her life and used to play in a band.

I am so excited! I want to begin playing at once, I shall have allot of practice to do and I am afraid my family may become slightly distracted in the next few weeks, months, years......

The Sun Before a Storm

Why shine you so bright

Above clouds of the deepest blue

(So dark as to be black)

Coming to cover you.

You yet brighten my room,

Faintly I feel

Warmth from your rays

Though close now was that peal

Thunder darkens the air

The old bull dog cowers

But you are still shining 

Not yet taken by showers

Is it bravery? Do you laugh

The storm to scorn? But oh,

Your face is fading now

And hides from us, wet, below.

 ***

In faded old daylight

I wrote in pencil, black and white.

What colour will you be 

To the world as a tree

is to me?

On Writing Poetry, Robert Frost

   "A poem is never a put-up job so to speak. It begins as a lump in the throat, a sense of wrong, a homesickness, a lovesickness. It is never a thought to begin with. It is at its best when it is a tantalizing vagueness. It finds its thought and succeeds, or doesn't find it and comes to nothing. It finds its thought or makes its thought. I suppose it finds it lying around with others not so much to its purpose in a more or less full mind. That's why it oftener comes to nothing in youth before experience has filled the mind with thoughts. It may be a big big emotion then and yet finds nothing it can embody in. It finds the thought and the thought finds the words. Let's say again: A poem particularly must not begin with thought first."-Robert Frost


   "I have never been good at revising. I always thought I made things worse by recasting and retouching. I never knew what was meant by choice of words. It was one word or none. When I saw more than one possible way of saying a thing I knew I was fumbling and turned from writing. If I ever fussed a poem into shape I hated and distrusted it afterward. The great and pleasant memories are of poems that were single strokes ( one stroke to the poem) carried through. I won't say I haven't learned with the years something of the tinker's art. I'm surprised to find sometimes how I have just missed the word. It wasn't that I was groping for my meaning. I had that clear enough and I had thought I had said the word for it. But I hadn't said within a row of apple trees of it. "-Robert Frost


    "In literature it is our business to give people the thing that will make them say, "Oh yes I know what you mean." It is never to tell them something they dont know, but something they know and hadnt thought of saying. It must be something they recognize." Frost Letter to John Barlett

 

On Robert Frost

In researching for an essay on Robert Frost and Walt Whitman's poems I found this article Robert Frost On Writing. Part dealt with how Robert Frost used tones and every day speech in his poems. I have been interested in the way we we speak and intonation lately by listening to people communicating. Here are some quotes:

'A proper understanding of intonation, the sense of the speaking voice, opened up to Frost endless possibilities for poetic effects. At the furthest extreme, intonation alone could carry meaning, quite divorced from particular words. Frost was fond of citing the example of listening to the rise and fall of voices behind closed doors or just out of earshot, where individual words could not be discerned, yet meaning, emotion, and dramatic interaction could all be intuited. Similarly, he had a Celtic delight in listening to the limited vocabulary of hearty curses and the infinite variety of meanings they could convey, depending solely "on the tones of saying it and the situations." But intonations conveyed most when they occurred most naturally, as interdependent with the actual words, when the voice itself could add connotative to denotative meaning.' 

I too like to listen to people taking just out of clear hearing distance.  And this is what I myself was trying to say a couple of posts ago.

"Take, for instance, the expression 'oh.' The American poets use it in practically one tone, that of grandeur: 'Oh Soul!' 'Oh Hills! ' - 'Oh Anything! ' That's the way they go. But think of what 'oh' is really capable: the 'oh' of scorn, the 'oh' of amusement, the 'oh' of surprise, the 'oh' of doubt - and there are many more." 

I liked this quote especially (the emphasis is mine).

 'Art consists not in creating new variations (for that would place the artist outside nature) but in listening for tones that have not been stereotyped by literary expression, in collecting and arranging. Appreciation rests in recognition, not discovery.'

 One of my favorite poems of Frost's is Nothing Gold Can Stay:

My brother, Peter, took the photo of the sunset at a beach near us.

Robert Frost: Lovers' Quarrel With the World (clip)