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November 25, 2020

I have completed acceptable first two draft ghazals inspired by String Quartets 1 & 2 by R.Murray Schaffer, cognizant of what I’m learning from Ravishing DisuUities and Hungry Listening. I enjoy composing in modern ghazal forms, and have plenty to learn. The rhyme scheme is more comfortable with every outing, and the disunity between couplets is a strength in my work. The rhythm of line and couplet  is proving to be the hardest to learn. I took a week or two between ghazals to collect my uncollected poems  called Spontaneous Combustion, for now. My whereabouts for now, will be largely spawned by my imagination, but the physical me be staying right here, in Gimli, writing in place.

Thursday, Oct 22, 2020

I realize my website fantasy will only ever  border on reality at best. I realize I want to blog for every heading in my banner. So for now, I am double posting my blog, aka my daily flog or fog until I can be sure the “first” blog has settled in under B in the archives. That’s not all, I plan to blog for “Listen, Here,” for sure and then create content unsteady as he goes for MLIP (My Life In Pieces) which will largely be video and audio podcasts, “pain room,”attempting to become an outsider art show, and annotate The complete Jimmy Bang,which now has many more new and blues poems the original 32 punk poems. And what to do with the Mennonite Book of the Dead, aka Dead Mennonites, Boundary Creek, He was the kind of guy and What Men Do.

The Ballad of the Children of the Czar

Published: October 17, 2020 | Edit
 
SHORT INTRO
This old thing is my favourite poem by Delmore Schwartz, and in my top 100 favourite poems. This one is copied from the Poetry Foundation site, citation at the bottom.There may be many good pictures of Schwartz but I haven’t found them. These are from https://pcolman.wordpress.com/tag/lou-reed/. A blog by Padraig Colman.Lou Reed took a course from Schwartz in the 1960s and considered they were both poets from Brooklyn. I admire them.

The Ballad of the Children of the Czar

 
1
The children of the Czarhttps://pcolman.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/later.jpg?resize=152%2C183
Played with a bouncing ball.
 
In the May morning, in the Czar’s garden,  
Tossing it back and forth.
 
It fell among the flowerbeds   
Or fled to the north gate.
 
A daylight moon hung up
In the Western sky, bald white.
 
Like Papa’s face, said Sister,   
Hurling the white ball forth.
 
 
       2
 
While I ate a baked potato   
Six thousand miles apart,
 
In Brooklyn, in 1916,   
Aged two, irrational.
 
When Franklin D. Roosevelt   
Was an Arrow Collar ad.
 
O Nicholas! Alas! Alas!
My grandfather coughed in your army,
 
Hid in a wine-stinking barrel,   
For three days in Bucharest
 
Then left for America
To become a king himself.
 
 
       3
 
I am my father’s father,
You are your children’s guilt.https://pcolman.files.wordpress.com/2014/07/atlas.jpg?resize=331%2C548
 
In history’s pity and terror   
The child is Aeneas again;
 
Troy is in the nursery,
The rocking horse is on fire.
 
Child labor! The child must carry   
His fathers on his back.
 
But seeing that so much is past   
And that history has no ruth
 
For the individual,
Who drinks tea, who catches cold,
 
Let anger be general:
I hate an abstract thing.
 
 
       4
 
Brother and sister bounced   
The bounding, unbroken ball,
 
The shattering sun fell down   
Like swords upon their play,
 
Moving eastward among the stars   
Toward February and October.
 
But the Maywind brushed their cheeks   
Like a mother watching sleep,
 
And if for a moment they fight   
Over the bouncing ball
 
And sister pinches brother   
And brother kicks her shins,
 
Well! The heart of man is known:   
It is a cactus bloom.
 
 
       5
 
The ground on which the ball bounces   
Is another bouncing ball.
 
The wheeling, whirling world   
Makes no will glad.
 
Spinning in its spotlight darkness,   
It is too big for their hands.
 
A pitiless, purposeless Thing,   
Arbitrary and unspent,
 
Made for no play, for no children,   
But chasing only itself.
 
The innocent are overtaken,   
They are not innocent.
 
They are their father’s fathers,
The past is inevitable.
 
 
       6
 
Now, in another October   
Of this tragic star,
 
I see my second year,   
I eat my baked potato.
 
It is my buttered world,
But, poked by my unlearned hand,
 
It falls from the highchair down   
And I begin to howl.
 
And I see the ball roll under   
The iron gate which is locked.
 
Sister is screaming, brother is howling,   
The ball has evaded their will.
 
Even a bouncing ball   
Is uncontrollable,
 
And is under the garden wall.   
I am overtaken by terror
 
Thinking of my father’s fathers,   
And of my own will.
 
Delmore Schwartz, “The Ballad of the Children of the Czar” from Selected Poems (1938-1958): Summer Knowledge. Copyright © 1967 by Delmore Schwartz. Reprinted with the permission of New Directions Publishing Corporation, www.wwnorton.com/nd/welcome.htm.
Source: Selected Poems (1938-1958): Summer Knowledge (New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1967)

2 Comments

  1. H. Rogge
    Posted October 17, 2020 at 9:41 pm | Permalink | Edit

    Happy to get your stuff.
    Would never have heard of Delmore Schwartz
    brilliant

    H.

     

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    Victor Enns reads and writes poetry and fiction. Afghanistan Confessions, poems in the voice of Canadian soldiers, was published in 2014, boy in 2012. Lucky Man (2005) was nominated for the McNally Robinson Manitoba Book of the Year award.

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