Éireann Lorsung

Dickinson House visual

[Image source: http://ohbara.com/projects/portfolio/dickinson-house/  Dickinson House was a writer's residency that EL ran when she lived in Belgium.]

Out the window the snow begins as it has all week, off and on, and the four o'clock dimness sets in, but it is tolerable because of the snow and the little colored lights and the darkness of the neighboring house mirroring the lights from our windows, and in the distance I can hear the poets I love begin to talk about their lives (and other poets begin to scold them for talking about their lives) and their red shoes and their fear, and I wish the poets could come stay in this anonymous house far away, with all the people they love and the people they love, all the people I love and the ones they love, all of us here in the dim with the small lights and the houses next door empty of neighbors

From a poem by Éireann Lorsung. The poem has a very long title beginning When I say... If I gave the whole title you'd have forgotten about the extract I wished to highlight.

Here the poem plays a game about welcoming people in. It's not irrelevant that EL* did run a writer's residency for several years, so she really has had poets come to stay. And she's also a teacher, so I guess pretty comfortable with rooms full of people.

And yet in the poem this is complicated. As soon as the wish includes so many poets, and then widens out to embrace all the people they love and all the people she loves, well that welcome is getting bigger and bigger but it's also taking on fantastical and unreal proportions. It's a soap bubble that grows and grows and bursts.

And in the anonymous house, what then? A loneliness and emptiness, maybe. But it also seems tolerable, with the Christmas lights that someone arranged and the reflections of light in the darkened windows over the way: a resonance tranquillized by distance and time. After all it's rather nice that the neighbours have gone away. The fancied voices of beloved poets are also a reflection: the poets exist, but not in this place. So the passage expresses the consolations of solitude, it is a rich kind of emptiness, not the featureless type but the emptiness of something that can be imagined as full: an absence.

"in the distance I can hear the poets I love"  ... So for a second we imagine EL reading their poetry, but that's not clear, maybe they are only chatting -- "about their lives (and other poets begin to scold them for talking about their lives)". It isn't clear, and the unclarity is pointed. After all it's a small debate about good manners, if people should go on about their lives, and it's also a big debate about poetry, should poems be autobiographical.

The implication is that those two debates are connected with each other. And there's a difficult question emerging here, is loving poets central to why we want to read poetry (for we certainly do love our favourite poets), and if so is writing our own poem a persuasion to love us -- no, no, that sounds very bad, but .... Yet isn't love of a kind central to what art is for? How to express the worth of artistic endeavour if it isn't something to do with love?

I'm not talking about the rest of the poem but it certainly observes how love forms the architecture of our experience, the love of selected loved ones and of other people and all people and dead people, love and the absence of love. Love, and fear.

"and their red shoes and their fear". Hard to avoid the allusion to "The Red Shoes", Hans Christian Andersen's tale of compulsive restlessness, himself the most restless and fearful of travellers. But if it has an unacknowledged autobiographical element, it's also deeply anti-feminist in its fear of Karin's free spirit and her rebellion against staying small; in Andersen's own terms the red shoes probably means a career of prostitution or at least its moral equivalent. And yet (or rather, and so) it now strikes us as a potent feminist parable about the challenges of stepping forth as a woman with a public career, about being willing to be noticed, about the tribal judgments and attitudes that still haunt our world.

*

Weir, fishbed, river a straightened ellipsis after 1918

What red flowers were worked here in what hand
Wh at blue

We covered the stove with Delft tiles
We laid our bones across one another, to be found like that


from An archeology, a poem about inhabitation and migration, living and moving. Specifically Flanders during the 1940 occupation, but conceiving long vistas before and after. Conceiving rather than seeing: these lines are preoccupied with the unseen and with those frail signals to the future ("to be found") that so often don't get through or can't be interpreted.

*

Éireann Lorsung is another poet I've discovered via the anthology women: poetry: migration, ed. Jane Joritz-Nakagawa (2017). (At the time it was put together, EL was living in Belgium, though she's since moved back to the USA.)




Éireann Lorsung's web page introduction to herself and what she does:

http://ohbara.com/portfolio/

Charlotte Bhaskar's review of EL's Her book (2013):

https://www.zyzzyva.org/2013/08/28/evoking-the-physical-and-tangible-of-art-and-life-eireann-lorsungs-her-book/

2016 interview with EL by Taeler Kallmerten on the excellent Newfound site. It touches on both the poems I've written about, among many other things.

https://newfound.org/2016/02/07/west-illegitimately-an-interview-with-eireann-lorsung/


*

*This represents my latest, not especially happy, attempt to find a better way of referring to the author under discussion (once I've supplied their full name, obviously).

When we talk about dead authorities, using the bare surname is inevitable, sanctioned by tradition, and raises no hackles (though maybe it should). I've written hundreds of posts about "Shakespeare", "Scott", "Dickens", etc.

But I strongly dislike referring to contemporary writers in that way.  Partly because it always gives me a jar to see myself referred to as "Peverett". I haven't been called that since I was at junior school! Why are you infantilizing me and what I do? OK, I might play the fool now and then, but I assure you I'm all growed up! And talking about poetry is one of the most grown-up things any of us do, I'm putting my whole heart into this, my whole long life experience... So don't treat it like a school assignment...  Those are the thoughts that flash through my mind, whenever I'm Peverett-ed.

But besides that, I feel that I'm apt to write and think less honestly about the writers and their work and my own response to it if I adopt a naming convention that I'd never use to their face. (And every so often these were people I actually knew.)

So then I tried using the writer's first name, and sometimes that approach has felt totally right (for example, when writing about Tim Allen, a poet of my own generation with whom I've often had exchanges over the years).

But it's rather a different matter when e.g the writer's a woman who's much younger than me, someone I don't know at all. In that context throwing around someone's first name seems distinctly matey if not creepy. I don't take any credit for sensitivity in registering that unease. On the contrary, I think the embarrassment betrays susceptibilities within myself and other het males of my generation that are the reverse of admirable. But whatever, there's many times when the first-name thing doesn't feel appropriate, and I'm just not doing it.

So that's why I'm now trying the approach of using initials. It isn't very elegant, and its virtues are mainly negative e.g.  it is neither stuffy nor chummy. It isn't what people do in academic essays, and that seems to me a very good and important thing: academic conventions have long been a hindrance to the integrity of expressing what we really think and know and feel. And I do think initials are quite honest in this respect: that they probably are the form I'd choose if I was repeatedly referring to the same writer in a missive to a friend, for example.

Christmas tree sentences

Frenchay Forestry, Bristol

[Image source: http://www.bristolpost.co.uk/whats-on/shopping/where-buy-christmas-tree-bristol-691998]




Every establishment has to have its Christmas tree. The most impressive one I saw this past week-end was outside the Milk Churn, a newly built Hall & Woodhouse chain pub on the expanding Hampton Park trading estate in Melksham.


At IKEA, in the understore carpark, there were queues of people threading sociably into a gridded square stacked with sleeved trees. The trees (fresh Norway Spruces, smelling of rain and resin) were £25 each but the irresistible point was, they also gave you a £20 IKEA voucher to use in the shop.


Laura doesn't like them using real trees. She's planning to get a £4 artificial tree from Homebase. She wants to decorate it on Wednesday, while she's looking after Shelden for the afternoon.






Nordmann Fir, the non-drop Christmas tree -- they call them "Nordmanns" in the trade.





Not liking to buy a real fir tree may seem a bit illogical when we'll happily buy wooden shelving, or give bunches of cut flowers, or consume cabbages, etc.  And since young trees lock up more carbon than older ones, the regular consumption of Christmas trees ought to be a good thing from the climate change perspective. A lot better than throwaway Christmas jumpers, anyhow.



Our sensitivity perhaps has something to do with the tree being a whole organism (at any rate, the whole organism above ground). We are reacting, I suppose, like those many meat-eaters who like the look of burgers or steaks but would not much relish looking at a whole dead cow. There's something, too, about the use to which our fir tree will be put to. It's going to be a centrepiece of celebration and piety, and that feels a bit too close to an old-school sacrificial rite. And finally, as if in mockery of the victim, its intended role is as a simulacrum of a living tree, displaying for us its fresh juicy leaves and resinous wood, even though its own death is certain, even though the fatal dissevering has already been performed. (And conifers, being a primitive sort of plant life, cannot re-grow from that. )


How can we not respond to the pathos of Hans Christian Andersen's "The Fir-Tree" , from 1844?  


.....the Tree was pulled out and thrown—rather hard, it is true—down on the floor, but a man drew him toward the stairs, where the daylight shone.
"Now a merry life will begin again," thought the Tree. He felt the fresh air, the first sunbeam—and now he was out in the courtyard. All passed so quickly, there was so much going on around him, that the Tree quite forgot to look to himself. The court adjoined a garden, and all was in flower; the roses hung so fresh and odorous over the balustrade, the lindens were in blossom, the Swallows flew by, and said, "Quirre-vit! my husband is come!" but it was not the Fir-tree that they meant.
"Now, then, I shall really enjoy life," said he, exultingly, and spread out his branches; but, alas! they were all withered and yellow. It was in a corner that he lay, among weeds and nettles. The golden star of tinsel was still on the top of the Tree, and glittered in the sunshine.
In the courtyard some of the merry children were playing who had danced at Christmas round the Fir-tree, and were so glad at the sight of him. One of the youngest ran and tore off the golden star.
"Only look what is still on the ugly old Christmas tree!" said he, trampling on the branches, so that they all cracked beneath his feet.   ....


(In the 2011 Danish TV film, they softened Andersen's story by introducing a note of hope at the end. The tree still died, but one of its cones fell to the ground and seeded. But perhaps the makers thought a big turd-shaped spruce-cone would seem unfamiliar or unattractive, so in the film they used a pine-cone instead. Anyway, spruce trees don't produce viable seed until they are at least twenty years old and quite tall, so the cones are in full light. It's such fun being pedantic!)


The Norway Spruce (Picea abies) is a magnificent big tree of Eastern Europe, Scandinavia and Russia. It only really looks at its best in its native woods. Its timber doesn't last well out of doors, but has many uses inside. For example, it is the standard "tonewood" of violins, cellos, etc; it is what Stradivarius violins are made of.


Six years after Hans Andersen's story, in 1850, Dickens wrote "A Christmas Tree", one of his most wonderful short pieces. I can't resist giving its opening lines:

I have been looking on, this evening, at a merry company of children assembled round that pretty German toy, a Christmas Tree. The tree was planted in the middle of a great round table, and towered high above their heads. It was brilliantly lighted by a multitude of little tapers; and everywhere sparkled and glittered with bright objects. There were rosy-cheeked dolls, hiding behind the green leaves; and there were real watches (with movable hands, at least, and an endless capacity of being wound up) dangling from innumerable twigs; there were French-polished tables, chairs, bedsteads, wardrobes, eight-day clocks, and various other articles of domestic furniture (wonderfully made, in tin, at Wolverhampton), perched among the boughs, as if in preparation for some fairy housekeeping; there were jolly, broad-faced little men, much more agreeable in appearance than many real men--and no wonder, for their heads took off, and showed them to be full of sugar-plums; there were fiddles and drums; there were tambourines, books, work-boxes, paint-boxes, sweetmeat-boxes, peep-show boxes, and all kinds of boxes; there were trinkets for the elder girls, far brighter than any grown-up gold and jewels; there were baskets and pincushions in all devices; there were guns, swords, and banners; there were witches standing in enchanted rings of pasteboard, to tell fortunes; there were teetotums, humming-tops, needle-cases, pen-wipers, smelling-bottles, conversation-cards, bouquet-holders; real fruit, made artificially dazzling with gold leaf; imitation apples, pears, and walnuts, crammed with surprises; in short, as a pretty child, before me, delightedly whispered to another pretty child, her bosom friend, "There was everything, and more." This motley collection of odd objects, clustering on the tree like magic fruit, and flashing back the bright looks directed towards it from every side--some of the diamond-eyes admiring it were hardly on a level with the table, and a few were languishing in timid wonder on the bosoms of pretty mothers, aunts, and nurses--made a lively realisation of the fancies of childhood; and set me thinking how all the trees that grow and all the things that come into existence on the earth, have their wild adornments at that well-remembered time. (from "A Christmas Tree")

[Teetotum: A spinning-top with four or six numbered or lettered faces, that can be used to play games in a similar way to dice.]




Something magic about a small child gazing up at the sparkling tree with all its decorations. The heart of the home. Household deity, worship of capital, a residual longing for the temples of the woods, from which our houses seal us, in all other respects so conveniently? Aspiration of the parents, seeing their trouble rewarded by such guileless absorption of the values of the family?


Or does the festooned tree lead the small eyes up, like Plato's ladder of love in the Symposium, from the material of hanging chocolate to an angel, scarcely visible in the mundane world, but seeing and supervising all, and pointing with its china hand to still more dizzying ascents of the spirit into the zenith?


When I was a child, we'd get the Christmas box down from the loft (it was an old suitcase). There were various decorations inside, such as goats and stars made from straw and red wool; very fiddly to disentangle from each other,  also quite fiddly to loop round the thin pricking needles of the spruce. There were other painted figures made from pine: gingerbread men, and an orange fox (rumoured to be a spring decoration, but always brought out at Christmas because it wasn't worth going to the trouble of getting the suitcase down from the loft in March just for the sake of a couple of spring decorations. Less appealing to my parents, but more so to myself, were the sumptuous glittering glass baubles. We only had about four of them. I insisted on hanging them up myself. On a couple of them the fittings were a bit broken, exposing a throat of jagged glass on which you could cut yourself if you weren't very careful.

Epiphany at Frome Recycling Centre 

In the UK it's considered a social duty to throw away or hide all your Christmas decorations on (or preferably before) "the twelfth day of Christmas". The 6th January is therefore a day of utilitarian gloom, in marked contrast to the celebrations of Epiphany in other European countries.