a thread in which ilx interprets poems, sometimes line by line, and disagrees a lot (probably)

c&p yr stanzas and yr readings below!

(threads for individual poets need not derail to here but here is where we can dig into anyone who doesn't have their own thread and maybe isn't so likely to; also where cross-fertilisation and comnparison can flourish)

From the Larkin thread:

For me, Larkin is particular and personal and local: work is a toad squatting on my life. Parents are shit. Hull is other people. I can't get laid even in a sexy time. He has a grasp of details. He touches universal themes from time to time, but his feet were on the ground.

(I love Larkin BTW)

Stevens is an ontological writer concerned with the universe and with Berkelian perception: masts against a seascape create an order (if a perceiving being contemplates them). A jar shapes a landscape and ultimately a universe (if a perceiving being contemplates it). A frozen dessert, while you contemplate it, is an empire. A stupid bird becomes a whole fucking universe, while you are contemplating it. Any observed detail, to Stevens, can be a springboard into the universal. He touches reality from time to time, but his head was in the clouds.

(I love Stevens BTW)

Can't imagine a world without both

Does anyone like Stephen Dunn other than me and Stephen Dunn and Stephen Dunn's mom?

Derek Walcott: ‘A Far Cry from Africa’

A wind is ruffling the tawny pelt
Of Africa. Kikuyu, quick as flies,
Batten upon the bloodstreams of the veldt.
Corpses are scattered through a paradise.
Only the worm, colonel of carrion, cries:
"Waste no compassion on these separate dead!"
Statistics justify and scholars seize
The salients of colonial policy.
What is that to the white child hacked in bed?
To savages, expendable as Jews?

Threshed out by beaters, the long rushes break
In a white dust of ibises whose cries
Have wheeled since civilization's dawn
From the parched river or beast-teeming plain.
The violence of beast on beast is read
As natural law, but upright man
Seeks his divinity by inflicting pain.
Delirious as these worried beasts, his wars
Dance to the tightened carcass of a drum,
While he calls courage still that native dread
Of the white peace contracted by the dead.

Again brutish necessity wipes its hands
Upon the napkin of a dirty cause, again
A waste of our compassion, as with Spain,
The gorilla wrestles with the superman.
I who am poisoned with the blood of both,
Where shall I turn, divided to the vein?
I who have cursed
The drunken officer of British rule, how choose
Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?
Betray them both, or give back what they give?
How can I face such slaughter and be cool?
How can I turn from Africa and live?

In this Walcott poem some of the final lines look quite straightforward:

'how choose / Between this Africa and the English tongue I love?'

- looks like a quite stagey statement of a postcolonial cultural dilemma. (Not much more stagey than the slightly related moment in Joyce's PORTRAIT.)

But how does that relate to the rest of the poem?

The poem seems to be about violence in general affecting Africa - both black and white people. The word 'Jews' is used to indicate the readiness with which black Africans are killed (this poem is only 15 years at most after WWII). Yet there is still more going on in the poem - nature, birds, weather. I don't think I have yet taken it all in.

I remember a lively discussion in my undergrad poetry class about this poem. Seems to me Walcott as poet is in a position to make use of English verse's forms and traditions but feels a tug from his native land: these forms and traditions were in the service of imperialism.

'A far cry' is usually an idiom to refer quite lightly to two things being different.

'Playing in the CL Final is a far cry from his non-league roots'.

I think that DW may be using that idiom but not with that meaning (thus the use would be somewhat ironic). Does it here mean, rather, 'a cry from Africa, heard here, far from Africa'? (Here being either the Caribbean or UK.)

'civilization's dawn' seems possibly to refer back to the idea of humanity beginning in Africa.

'white peace' seems a racialised term, yet of its precise meaning I remain unsure.

I assume that 'Spain' refers to that country's Civil War, though DW was too young for it.

I feel as though the poem ought to be clear, but isn't that clear, once you start digging through it.

In a white dust of ibises

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Angel_Dust_(Faith_No_More_album)

>????

"white peace" is a historical term. it refers to peace treaties in which both sides kind of go easy on the other, often reverting to whatever the terms were before the armed conflict

That's good knowledge Karl Malone, thanks!

I read this poem three times last night and enjoyed it more each time. It's playing with voice & expectations & all that but there's always, in Craig's poem, something wondrous, magical in the way words describe something happening and get to be as magical about it as they do or don't like.

Winter

A kind of Danish cow
long thought to be extinct
lumbers slowly from a fog-soaked forest.
Past the statue of two men shaking hands on horseback.
Into the trainyard with its newly
brunette-colored coal cars.
It is late, lamps light the trainyard.
One of the trainmen sees the cow and has a thought
like a small grey infant sinking
ever so slowly in the icy harbor.
The cow continues out the other side of the trainyard.
The trainman shudders at the thought.
The trainman’s cat Stamina crunches walnuts in her cat dish.

Now, nearly thirty years later,
ladies and gentlemen it is my great pleasure
to introduce to you that very same cow.
(The cow is led out onto the stage by a young boy dressed as a farmer.)

if the walcott poem was written 15-odd years after the end of WW2 then it it's too early to be "post-colonial"

i: it's abt the kikuyu (mentioned almost straight away)
ii: it was being written between the end of the mau mau uprising (1952-60) and kenyan independence (1963)

so this seems a good place to start

(the internet dates it to 1962)