already been sideswiped

Cold front

this shivering caravan

                            reeks of rum,

shadows smear an atlas

                    on a pillowcase

 
         idly silhouetting a rabbit

           on the masonite wall,

    iced-over scraps

on the laminex splashback
 

grey nomad buys clairol -

              the future looks bright
 

o        only a cold front 
 

                      is oblivion dark ?
 

come here for a moment,

                         sit and regard,

    gape at the landscape

                        we’ll never inhabit
 

en plein air

          is so much a sinkhole,

nowhere so zen

                   as some other place
 

who changed ‘the proposal’

                   into ‘the dream’ ?

I never said 

     ‘I’m living the plan’
 

I’ve already been sideswiped

                   and I was here last
 

my cup’s white interior

              tarnished by tannin,

  readers of teacups

                  expended by tea bags
 

such a dreamy hiatus

                    o       only a cold front
 

copying a trance

            is too difficult to do,

   sun on shut eye -

            deep eggy red orange
 

but pocket some wisdom

              when winter arrives

the grey sheen of sleet

              will cleanse us like windex

(By the Australian poet Pam Brown, b. 1948. One of five of her poems on the Lyrikline site; you can hear her read it too.  https://www.lyrikline.org/en/poems/cold-front-10619 .)

pillowcase: specified, instead of "pillow", to make us envisage its rumpled surface; like the rest of the small caravan (the bed near the sink) it has a lived-in quality. This occupant has been living the dream for a while. The sun that smears the shadows and invites the rabbit silhouette must be low on the horizon. With some hesitation I think this is an early morning poem, not long after sunrise.

masonite: a brand of hardboard (made by the Mason method, patented 1898). The surface is smooth, the back indented with a lattice pattern.

laminex splashback: Laminex are an Australian manufacturer of laminates, e.g. for kitchen bench tops and splashbacks. The one in this caravan needs a good wipe.

clairol: makers of Nice 'n' Easy and other types of hair dye. Rather to my surprise I couldn't find that Clairol have ever deployed "the future looks bright" as an advertising slogan.

o         only a cold front : the small "o" is like an anti-ejaculation: not surprise, not drama, but the deeper bodily response always stirred by weather events

is oblivion dark? : the poem begins to open out, with a thought that evidently picks up from "the future looks bright", but not in an obvious way.

come here for a moment : Is there really anyone to invite, or is the whole point that there's no-one?

gape at the landscape : reflecting the unhealthy isolation of a home, certainly; whether it's mobile or not. Also, the traveller's rueful wonder at perennially rediscovering that land is a plane, not a line. It can never be experienced in the completist way implied by "inhabit". And it's only by maintained violence that it can be possessed.

expended by tea bags : the poem is making us see something in that stained cup, but the language resists defining it. "Expends" usually applies to a resource (such as energy), and it's quite deranging here.

copying a trance / is too difficult to do: Someone who is actually in a trance is not "doing" anything. Copying a trance, on the other hand, is definitely doing something; and hence its difficulty, the failure is baked in. Though the words are different, I think this is still talking about "living the dream", another contradiction in terms. A dream, by definition, is something dreamt, not something lived.

sun on shut eye : If it wasn't for the "grey nomad", you might suppose our protagonist is a child; making rabbit silhouettes on the wall, remarking the colour of the sun through her eyelids . . . The sense persists of play, of amused wonder, though perhaps also of loneliness and lack of purpose.

windex: brand of glass cleaner. The comparison with sleet is openly imperfect, the two forms of imputed cleansing quite different. And cleansing, its desirability and its erasure, is a problematic that's central to this poem.

*

Michael Brennan's 2011 interview with Pam Brown:

https://www.poetryinternational.com/en/poets-poems/article/104-19669_Interview-with-Pam-Brown

I was fascinated by the candid history of her early reading, her discovery of experimental texts and their increasing importance for her. 

*

I got on to Pam Brown via something Lisa Samuels said in a 2020 interview, talking about the work in progress that became Breach (2021):

I had started a formal imitation exercise model for my poetry students and it turned into a book-length poem with very short lines, the kind of line brevity characteristic of the poet Pam Brown, whose style I was setting the students to imitate, though I suppose the Breach lines are closer to Tom Raworth’s in style. I almost never compose in such short lines, and I found the extreme enjambments and lexical parataxis delicious.

Here's an extract from Breach. 

The globe’s a

round thing with

fuzzy coordinates

proliferating

it’s a mirror

look look the

ambulatory

memes

crawl on your skin

each story

draws the attributes of

lent

around the next

box your attempts

you open

two eyes spoon

bowls inside

your headmouth

every hole turns

page blank

tributes

hone on pull

the scrip the

blow-through

hull

whose pheno-

scope

appears

on flags

a Code does

all the buildings

raw

tweaked pharmacy

flut

side walk

flesh in a trance

the shred fabric

closed

the hungry

methadone child

all pre

trans

figured

numb in the arms

chalk wield head

harder

outlines

(I found it here: https://pandemicsresearch.blogs.auckland.ac.nz/pandemics-reflected/transcripts/episode-1/ .)

The term "palilalia" appears in some advertisements of Breach ("performs a vital palilalia of lockdown"). In its medical sense it means "a language disorder characterised by the involuntary repetition of syllables, words and phrases" (Wikipedia).

leaves wrestle

 

Erman's Birch (Betula ermanii) maybe. Midsomer Norton, 23 April 2022.

the right to work                   
the rest not
just supposin’
baas
gibbets ahead
sweet rocket
rue
rubbed lemon balm
a snake
thoughtless as a bird
thud rolled hibiscus bloom
onto a plastic cover
water violets duck
earth
into water
into fire
into air
no longer
able to focus
the match flame
adoring its blue
‘shadow
my sweet nurse
keep me from burning’
george peele
had bethsabe say
educated in empire
internal colonialism
occupation
by a foreign power
whose
lives
does the government affect?
colossal heartburn
don’t confuse
not feeling able to go
with wanting to stay

machines
now live in space
we place them so
our shell is thicker
“what is that?”
“that is a dancing girl”
“is it killed
with, or by, now?”

[from Tom Raworth's "West Wind", written 1982-1983.]

Prunus 'Ukon'. Frome, 1 April 2022.

Yes, I know, "West Wind" is a somewhat obvious Tom Raworth poem to focus on. But suitable for Raworth novices, which is exactly what I am. 

For one thing, "West Wind" is unusually accessible. It appeared as the final poem of Tottering State: New and Selected Poems, 1963-1983 (1984). It's in the Collected Poems (2003) of course. It's also the most substantial piece in Miles Champion's selection As When (2015), which otherwise consists mostly of short poems. (That's where I read it.) It's also available online: 

https://my-blackout.com/2020/04/14/tom-raworth-west-wind/  

"West Wind" is accessible in another way, too. There are parts of the poem that comment angrily on political events of the time. (Margaret Thatcher appears as "a handbag".) Another section relates to visiting his mother in hospital before her death in 1983, and her memory loss. These are just the kind of topics we expect modern poems to be about. But not poems by Tom Raworth. 

The glimpses of emotion and autobiography light up pathways through the dense text; it's astonishing to discover how much life subsists within these telegraphic lines of one or two words, predominantly nouns. 

Perhaps as a result, "West Wind" has received more commentary than most other Raworth poems (see end of post for examples).

Prunus 'Ukon'. Bath, 8 April 2022.

The extract came from section XI, the last and longest. (They are not actually numbered.)

Here it is once more, with notes:

the right to work

[Slogan used by protesters against high unemployment.

the rest not                                 
just supposin’   

                 

[1980 Status Quo album, with a cruise missile on the sleeve.

baas                                   

                

[Sheep. Also "boss" as used by black Africans to white colonials (King Solomon's Mines; Time of the Butcherbird).

gibbets ahead
sweet rocket

[Another name for Dame's Violet (Hesperis matronalis).

rue                  

[A herb; sorrow, regret, repentance and (a major theme of "West Wind") remembrance.

rubbed lemon balm
a snake
thoughtless as a bird
thud rolled hibiscus bloom  

onto a plastic cover

[Hibiscus flower has a snake-like appearance. Motif on beachwear fabrics etc.

water violets duck   

               

[Water Violet: Hottonia palustris.

earth                  

into water

into fire
into air

[The four elements...

no longer
able to focus
the match flame 

adoring its blue 

[Cf. "a city's blue glow spikes / from shadows fanned" (Section I), "matchsticks" (Section VI).                   

‘shadow                

my sweet nurse

keep me from burning’
george peele
had bethsabe say

[Sc. 1 of David and Bethsabe (c. 1594). Bethsabe's bathing song and subsequent speech connect three elements: fire, air and water. (The air is Zephyr, the West Wind.) But as Raworth notes, the real matter of her enjoyment and David's lust is the unspoken element, earth.

educated in empire
internal colonialism
occupation
by a foreign power

[The Falklands, April 1982. But internally we too are occupied by a foreign power (Westminster). 

whose
lives
does the government affect?
colossal heartburn
don’t confuse
not feeling able to go
with wanting to stay 

machines             

now live in space

[Satellites, since 1957. The vast majority are American. Ronald  Reagan proposed the Strategic Defense Initiative in March 1983.

we place them so

our shell is thicker

[Cf. "armour", "carapaces", elsewhere in the poem.

“what is that?”
“that is a dancing girl”
“is it killed               

with, or by, now?”

[Moral agency of machines.

Pear blossom (Pyrus communis). Frome, 12 April 2022.

Other notes:

from Section VI:

the      w     particle      

[Predicted in the 1960s, detected in 1983. Important in radioactive decay. 

shadowed by sunset

slid right

leaving an ocean           

flattened by the moon  

[The moon's gravity stretches the ocean (towards the sublunar point) and thus flattens it. In this scene the poet looks southward over the sea (English Channel? Brighton?). Sunset is on the right and a rising full moon on the left. The poet is looking ahead but thinking behind: into his own head: "nothing in their heads / but a sense of distance / between their ears" and behind him "i feel / behind me / examining my hair / friend / lifeless rock". (The question of what's alive and what isn't alive keeps coming up in the poem, e.g. in connection with technology -- computers, missiles.)

Reproduction of the graphic at the end of Section VI of "West Wind"

This was fun. I was trying to work out how Raworth's graphic was made. As you can see from the colours, most of the pattern can be drawn with just three lines. There are then seven accretions, mostly on the right (from TULIP downwards), and an isolated one at the bottom (STOAT). 

Some of the words are split up: O / SIP  (e.g. Mandelstam) ; MA / JORCA . 

ARGUS : Operation Argus was a 1958 US nuclear test to see if high altitude nuclear detonations produced "phenomena of potentially significant military importance by interfering with communications and weapons performance".

The graphic relates in a very general way to the introspective end of Section VI; the poet's uneasy thinking, fear of the pointlessness of language, and desire to believe in its solidity and solace:

the noise 

of mind

leaves wrestle

stalks green

matchsticks

descriptive words

verbs

directions

spherical geometry

the comfort of nouns

Honesty (Lunaria annua). Frome, 12 April 2022.

from Section VII:

timex

down to france

computer city

[One of the earliest home computers, the Timex/Sinclair 1000 (US version of the Sinclair ZX-81) went on sale in 1981. It cost $99.

richard seebright (?)    

fruit painter

[Richard Sebright (1868-1951) at Royal Worcester.

Common Mouse-ear (Cerastium fontanum). Bratton hill fort, 15 April 2022.

from Section VIII:

cement works

by the medway

[There are several between Snodland and Rochester. The poet is on his way to visit his mother in hospital. By train, most likely, as in Section X.

faint dots

apple green

through stiff orchards

thirties white concrete

glass shattered

in rusted frames

my mother sits 

[From the description this sounds like the original building of the Kent and Canterbury Hospital, opened in 1937 and then noted for its gleaming white walls. 

The hospital campus was much expanded in the 1960s, which might explain "the doctor / is at the other hospital" (Section IX). 

English Elm (Ulmus procera). Frome, 16 April 2022.

from Section IX:

god made me

no

my parents made me

a protection

and an ornament

new money

says in Latin

a motto

my father notes

evelyn

recommended to charles

[John Evelyn's motto for the Royal Society: Nullius in verba. Based on Horace and meaning "Swearing allegiance to no master", i.e. Don't take somebody else's word for it (Aristotle's, say). 

Unfortunately the same principle of sturdy independence from authority doesn't extend to deciding what to research, or who purchases the results. In practice, science is an instrument for the exploitation of others. That, of course, is my opinion, not Tom Raworth's. As one of the earliest survivors of open heart surgery, he might reflect that his adult life was made by science, as well as by his parents.

Sophie Watson on nullius in verba : https://www.plebity.org/conversations/nullius-in-verba-take-no-ones-word

followed

by an alliance party broadcast

[The grieving poet thinks it's "lucky" his mother is missing the party political broadcast by the SDP-Liberal Alliance (in the lead-up to the general election of June 1983). 

Greater Pond-sedge (Carex riparia). Biss Meadows (Trowbridge), 20 April 2022.

from Section X:

what distance

between the double orange lines

in a roman wall? 

[As on the Roman wall at Silchester, where double lines of tile alternate with flint and stone. Maybe there's something like that in the Roman parts of Canterbury's city walls? 

Ribwort Plantain (Plantago lanceolata). Frome, 21 April 2022.

from Section XI:

five days ago

i saw a ring

around the evening sun

radius tip of thumb

to little finger

of my stretched right arm

brown to purple

edged by a rainbow

lacking red and orange

clouds almost clear

streamed from the horizon

bent at the colour

as smoke in a wind tunnel

[That's more than enough information to identify the ring as a 22 degree halo, the most common solar halo. 

A nice sighting to be told about, not exactly commonplace. But surely what stands out, in the context of a Raworth poem, is a lucidity that verges on chattiness; lines that distinctly lack compression or consequence or rapidity.

What's going on here? I think the underlying topic must be the poet's own unusual approach in this particular poem. He's, as it were, commenting ironically on it and wondering just how much of this kind of thing he wants to do. Not much at all, as it proved.

Apetalous form of Bulbous Buttercup (Ranunculus bulbosus). Frome, 21 April 2022.

Some pieces about Tom Raworth that I've enjoyed reading: 

Iain Sinclair, "The poet steamed". An LRB review of the Collected Poems and Removed for Further Study (essays about Raworth edited by Nate Dorward). 

https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v26/n16/iain-sinclair/the-poet-steamed

Brian M. Reed, 'Carry on, England: Tom Raworth's "West Wind," Intuition, and Neo-Avant-Garde Poetics", Contemporary Literature Vol. 47, No. 2 (Summer, 2006), pp. 170-206.

https://www.jstor.org/stable/4489156

Mandy Bloomfield, '"A fluctuating relationship with nature": Tom Raworth’s ecopoetics,' Critical Quarterly Vol 59 No 2 (2017), pp. 65-82:

https://www.academia.edu/40073084/_A_fluctuating_relationship_with_nature_Tom_Raworth_s_ecopoetics

I've also read "What Was To One Side or Not Real:The Poetry of Tom Raworth 1970–1991", a chapter in Robert Sheppard's The Poetry of Saying: British Poetry and its Discontents 1950-2000 (2005). The full text is available online, but I doubt if the download is legal, so I'm not giving the link.

White form of Honesty (Lunaria annua). Yate, 22 April 2022.

potentially

I'm on the move again, so probably will only manage a few distracted posts over the next few weeks, and this one is the first of them.

*

I'm very slowly feeling my way into reading Tom Raworth's poems with something more than distant and theoretical admiration. I'm influenced, probably much too influenced, by the (what seem to be) pregnant formulae of J.H. Prynne's comments on the back cover of As When, the 2015 Raworth selection chosen by Miles Champion. Here are his first two sentences:

Tom Raworth's mind has from the start been quick as a weasel, moving fast to the nub of the matter with a vivid trace of words on the run and in cool balance across their gathered darts. So adroit are these motions that they leave no residue along the edges or like some cloud above the centre; it's quite hard to implicate an author or presiding opinions because the profile is not blurred by such moody shadows. 

That's an awful lot of metaphors. And some kind of stuck needle with "start", "quick", "fast", "on the run", "darts", "adroit", and so forth. But "vivid trace of words" definitely resonates, and so does the "hard to implicate an author or presiding opinions", at least as a challenge.

For, yes, there's a critical question about modernist projects, but it's also my immediate issue, which I'll baldly express as How autobiographical are Tom Raworth's poems? Because where I am right now, my reading is emphatically "blurred", not indeed by a distinctly implicatable author nor by distinct presiding opinions, but by wondering if the indistinctness really means absence, or was absence ever the intention anyway, or should I even be thinking about this?





air breaks

flowers despair

colours withdraw

heat

abandons me

brain

no longer cares

to serve

words

refuse pattern

loved them

introduced

new friends

now

they desert me 

(from MESSAGE BOTTLE)



this harmless obsession
is all i do

this house without binoculars fades
look into the watch
bombs flash from the place's shadow

still toys i'm out of the game now

(PIETY)



this day i rest by my information
looks good anywhere becomes audible

basil rathbone is one of my favourite actors
i can always read graham greene and joe brainard

(from WELL)



sometimes the subtle night of sleep bores
music remembered places followed to despair
facades no substance aids my mood
i walk more clumsily
plane falls
in flames
o possible beauty          o lady
to trust without power
no end to reach
sun throws smoke shadows brown
across the page
my father was in burma during the war

(from EURODE)



this is where instincts norm
balloon said
unfriendly
i don't care what i watch

so it's been me and unreal
for a while
mapping
was learning how to say it faster

(from I AM SPECIOUS, HERR KOMMANDANT)



I'm thinking too much about the doing of these poems. I'm too clearly seeing " i " as the poet Tom Raworth, addressing a half-real half-imaginary audience of poet-readers. I might guess at opinions, but I certainly sense the shape of a personality (prone to boredom, moody, snappy, humorous); and either he, or I, am a bit wrapped up in the blank paper, the Olympia typewriter, the cigarette ash on his fingertips, and his artistic mission or lack of it.

It's not really what I want to see.

But I like "NOW THE PINK STRIPES" and some of the other early poems.





NOW THE PINK STRIPES


now the pink stripes, the books, the clothes you wear
in the eaves of houses i ask whose land it is

an orange the size of a melon rolling slowly across the field
where i sit at the centre in an upright coffin of five panes of glass

there is no air               the sun shines
and under me you've planted a quick growing cactus









I'll keep reading!

the face in the dream

Collage by Tom Raworth, c. 1989

[Image source: http://jacketmagazine.com/04/cccp.html .]



NOTES OF THE SONG/AIN'T GONNA STAY IN THIS TOWN LONG



the face in the dream is a name in the paper
bicycle shop smells ('sometimes my brain sings')
ice crystals bleed : these songs are songs of love

the levels write : they say
please let me in : the lights go out
(sometimes my nails sing)



(Tom Raworth, found in As When: A Selection, ed. Miles Champion (2015).)


*

As When has been criticized in some quarters because it doesn't tell you where each of the poems first appeared. It nearly does. It lists all the source publications, with dates, and it tells us that the poems are in chronological order, but still, there's a little knowledge gap. And that's clearly deliberate.

It means that I know the poem I've quoted is from around 1970, but that's all. The effect of this withheld information is to make us experience As When as a fresh book in its own right (a collaborative Champion/Raworth creation), and not the way we usually read Selecteds, i.e. as meta-literature that gives us partial views of other books.

Ted Berrigan (left) and Tom Raworth, c. 1971

[Image source: https://in.pinterest.com/pin/64880050863226434/ .]

Tom Raworth's obituary of Anselm Hollo in The Independent, published 30th January 2013:
https://www.independent.co.uk/news/obituaries/anselm-hollo-poet-translator-and-teacher-8473828.html

Geoff Ward's obituary of Tom Raworth in the Guardian, published 16th April 2017:
https://www.theguardian.com/books/2017/apr/16/tom-raworth-obituary

As often happens, this post turns out to have an unanticipated link with another recent post. Tom Raworth was born in Bexleyheath in 1938 and grew up in Welling, just down the road from Christopher Lee (Belvedere, born 1941), the future historian and dramatist who kept a diary of his time working on a tramp steamer. It's strange to think of these two young lads, both leaving school at fifteen, and their diversely unusual and impressive trajectories.

Penguin Modern Poets 19 Ashbery Harwood Raworth

Add caption

Sad thing, to think that in the past couple of years all three of the poets who appeared in this influential volume have died, most recently John Ashbery.


The volume catches their output to date in the year 1971.  By that time Ashbery and Lee Harwood had already delivered in spades;  some of their best poems are here. My perception is that Tom Raworth, the most formally radical of the three, was still feeling for the right kind of space, and the Raworth poems here are opening gambits.


Comparatively speaking. But opening the book at random, with 5 minutes to spare while waiting for a Linux engineer, lets enjoy this opening of a Raworth poem:




There Are Lime-Trees in Leaf on the Promenade
                           (for Ed & Helene)


the blossom blows
                                across the step
no moon.          night, the curtain moves


we had come back from seeing one friend in the week
they celebrated the twentieth anniversary of victory, fireworks
parades.         and all across the town the signs the french
people are not your allies mr johnson          who were
then, the old photographs.           garlanded the tanks with
flowers now
choke-cherry
                    a poison        we came
separately home


the children were there
covered with pink blossoms like burned men         taking
the things they laughed
                                   at the strange coins, tickets.           ran
around the house pointing up at the plane then
the only noise


there can be no dedication         all things in their way
are          the actual scars      tension.            the feeling
of isolation.           love
for me in one way is waiting for it to end


- - - - - - 


*


Re line 3, I couldn't help being struck by reading, the next day, in Laurie Duggan's No Particular Place to Go,




My poetry -- a life watching curtains flutter.




 ("Lives of the Poets")

now the pink stripes

NOW THE PINK STRIPES


now the pink stripes, the books, the clothes you wear
in the eaves of houses I ask whose land it is


an orange the size of a melon rolling slowly across the field
where I sit at the centre in an upright coffin of five panes of
           glass


there is no air            the sun shines
and under me you've planted a quick growing cactus












(Tom Raworth, who died on 8 February, 2017.)






http://tomraworth.com/notes/




Tom Clark
http://tomclarkblog.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/tom-raworth-1938-2017.html

Laurie Duggan
http://graveneymarsh.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/im-tom-raworth-1938-2017.html

S. J. Fowler
http://www.3ammagazine.com/3am/tomraworth/

John Harvey
https://straight75nochaser.wordpress.com/2017/02/10/tom-raworth-1938-2017/

Pierre Joris
http://www.pierrejoris.com/blog/?p=15132

Jacques Roubaud
http://poezibao.typepad.com/poezibao/2017/02/disparition-hommage-à-tom-raworth-par-jacques-roubaud.html

Robert Sheppard
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/robert-sheppard-im-tom-raworth-from.html
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/robert-sheppard-catacaustic-for-tom.html
http://robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/robert-sheppard-on-tom-raworth-speed-of.html




http://gistsandpiths.blogspot.co.uk/2017/02/tom-raworth-1938-2017.html

https://www.poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2017/02/tom-raworth-1938-2017/




The PennSound treasury of Raworth readings and recordings:
http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound/x/Raworth.php

Recommended: Amazon's Look Inside! the As When Carcanet Selection chosen by Miles Champion; includes most of a biographical introduction and some of the well-known early poems:
https://www.amazon.co.uk/d/cka/As-When-Selection-Tom-Raworth/1784100331/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1487679682&sr=1-1#reader_1784100331

Recommended: Marjorie Perloff, Charles Bernstein, and Michael S. Hennessey talk with Al Filreis about Tom Raworth's poem "Errory"
http://jacket2.org/podcasts/state-error-poemtalk-50

Collage by Tom Raworth

[Image source: http://www.tomraworth.com/pictures.html . It's in the William Fuller Collection, Chicago.]

Libby Houston

[Image source: https://mellotone70up.wordpress.com/tag/libby-houston/]

This is not the post I planned to write today, but I want to note it down while I think of it.

I was scanning through Tom Raworth's wonderful Notes (his blog, really), and in his account of the Lee Harwood memorial night in Brighton (25/9/15), he mentions a poet called Libby Houston, "whom I remember as the only woman poet in an overwhelmingly male reading scene of the early 1960s". As if that wasn't intriguing enough, he remarked that she might be the only poet of that era to have a tree named after her: Sorbus x houstoniae . (http://tomraworth.com/notes/?p=5647) .

That doesn't tell the half of it. Houston has done lots of work on the botany of the Avon Gorge for the university of Bristol; she's a skilled rock climber, She discovered Sorbus x houstoniae herself: there's only one known specimen and it can be reached only with ropes. It's a natural hybrid of Sorbus aria (the common whitebeam) with Sorbus bristoliensis (one of several unique endemics in the Avon Gorge).

All this is well documented on her Wikipedia entry. [Sadly, the beautiful photo used to illustrate Sorbus x houstoniae is, in fact, just Sorbus aria; ripening berries and big winking leaves photographed in Vivary Park, Taunton.]

Houston has published several poetry collections and I eventually tracked down an online poem on John Harvey's blog: https://mellotone70up.wordpress.com/tag/libby-houston/ :  I guess it's OK to reproduce it here:

In 1943
my father
dropped bombs on the continent

I remember
my mother
talking about bananas
in 1944

when it rained,
creeping alone to the windowsill,
I stared up the hill,
watching, watching,
watching without a blink
for the Mighty Bananas
to stride through the blitz

they came in paper bags
in neighbours’ hands
when they came
and took their time
over the coming

and still I don’t know
where my father
flying home
took a wrong turning

Apparently this was the first poem from her first collection, A Stained Glass Raree Show (1967), so it may not be very representative.

There are also three quotations and a nice photo of Libby Houston (with Sorbus blossom) here:

http://www.azquotes.com/author/32273-Libby_Houston


I'll update this post when I find out anything more.

Oak carving of Libby Houston by Alistair Park, 2014

[Image source: http://carvingswithstories.blogspot.co.uk/2014_11_01_archive.html]

The museum

[Image source (above and below): http://www.rugbooks.com/advSearchResults.php?action=search&orderBy=relevance&category_id=0&keywordsField=afghanistan]



These fragments I have shored against my ruins  

Somehow, modernism was in favour of museums. It was also anguished by them, by catastrophic history and a distasteful present, so the characteristic mode was irony.

By the time of the New York school, history seemed more catastrophic still. The poets begin to see the museum's contents in a different way. The details of the history you are supposed to be interested in became ridiculous. Irony died. A strong feeling of healthy irresponsibility blew through the room. It became apparent that the museum and its spaces and the items on display are crucially about now and here.

                                     whether it's the form of
Some creator who has momentarily turned away,
Marrying detachment with respect, so that the pieces
Are seen as part of a spectrum, independent
Yet symbolic of their spaced-out times of arrival;
Whether on the other hand all of it is to be
Seen as no luck.

(from John Ashbery's "Clepsydra", in Rivers and Mountains 1966. The first couple of pages of "Clepsydra", which include the above extract, are online here)

The third poet in Penguin Modern Poets 19, Tom Raworth, perceives the modernity too:

looking at the etruscan statues in the louvre there is a green
       patina on my hands my expression has taken its final
       shape
everything becomes modern inside these cases there is
       nothing without touching

children crawl under the glass      things are reflected several
       times

(from "Six Days", in The Relation Ship (1966))

Ashbery's idea of the "spectrum" becomes a "prism" in Lee Harwood's "The 'Utopia'" (Landscapes, 1967).

The table is very old and made of fine mahogany
polished by generations of servants.
And through the windows the summer blue skies
and white clouds spelling a puffy word.
And on the table the books and examples
of embroidery of the wild hill tribesmen
and many large and small objects - all of which
could not help but rouse a curiosity.

-----

At times it is hard to believe
what is before one's eyes -
there is no answer to this except the room itself,
and maybe the white clouds seen though the window.

------

*

ISIS destroys triumphal arches in Palmyra

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/06/world/middleeast/isis-syria-arch-triumph-palmyra.html?_r=0

As has often been pointed out, Daesh is philosophically just as western as it is eastern; indeed, the example of Daesh reveals such distinctions as inadequate to account for moves within a globalized world (though, of course, much remains in the stereotypes to be deftly exploited).

Daesh's intention to make a bonfire of both the nation-state and accumulated cultural riches is something that many of us will uncomfortably recognize as our own deep aspirations put into hideous practice.


*

"embroidery of the wild hill tribesmen".

Khamak and other Afghan embroideries are of course the art and labour of women. But owned and displayed by men, at least until they end up, - as a result of what transaction? - on this so-polished table...



*

Interview with Lee Harwood by Andy Brown in The Argotist Online - no date is given, but I should think it was around 2008.

http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Harwood%20interview.htm

Recent short (but helpful) take on Ashbery's "Clepsydra", by John Koethe.

http://atlengthmag.com/poetry/short-takes-on-long-poems-volume-2/