READING A POEM A DAY 12 23.2.2017

1887

AE Housman

From Clee to heaven the beacon burns,

The shires have seen it plain,

From north and south the sign returns

And beacons burn again.

Look left, look right, the hills are bright,

The dales are light between,

Because 'tis fifty years to-night

That God has saved the Queen.

Now, when the flame they watch not towers

About the soil they trod,

Lads, we'll remember friends of ours

Who shared the work with God.

To skies that knit their heartstrings right,

To fields that bred them brave,

The saviours come not home to-night:

Themselves they could not save.

It dawns in Asia, tombstones show

And Shropshire names are read;

And the Nile spills his overflow

Beside the Severn's dead.

We pledge in peace by farm and town

The Queen they served in war,

And fire the beacons up and down

The land they perished for.

"God Save the Queen" we living sing,

From height to height 'tis heard;

And with the rest your voices ring,

Lads of the Fifty-third.

Oh, God will save her, fear you not:

Be you the men you've been,

Get you the sons your fathers got,

And God will Save the Queen.

The poet writes this patriotic lay, this elegy for the war dead and, unbeknownst to him perhaps, the poet writes a searing anti-war, anti-monarchy, anti-God assertion for the lads of Shropshire, that county of England cleft to the breast of Wales, a beautiful, hilly, rural place, of strapping fellows, who on each side of 1887 are immolated in imperial wars, far from the shires, dales, beacons, work, fields and soil of their home-place.

Where is this empire, then? In North Africa, on the banks of the Nile? In Asia? What land took their lives? What Shropshire is this?

It dawns in Asia, tombstones show

And Shropshire names are read;

And the Nile spills his overflow

Beside the Severn's dead.

As ever, poems of the imperial wars make no mention of the local, the Asian or North African dead, many of whose descendants are now making their way to Shropshire, in coffin boats crossing the Mediterranean.

Can you perish for a land? Can God save the Queen? Only by turning his back on the

Lads of the Fifty-third

and all the other regiments, in all the imperial armies of today and of the days behind us. For

The saviours came not home tonight.

Houseman's poem may be a victim of the law of unintended consequences. No doubt he meant to praise the sacrifice, for sacrifice was, and is, the corrupt currency imperial armies use to drive lads – men and women- to their immolation, before 1887 and, with even more brutal mechanised force, in 1914.

In eight four line verses, readily sung to the classic abab rhyming scheme - hear a sung version on Chris Wood's album So Much To Defend - to arrive at the pay-off, where the sacrifice of the death is salvaged by the offer, no, the injunction, the imperial command that the survivors return home to beget more lads, women and men, to be immolated.

Be you the men you've been,

Get you the sons your fathers got

Is this a paean to fealty? To patriotism and allegiance? Is it a call to perpetual sacrifice in the service of empire, be it Victoria's or Star Trek's?

Or is it an anti-war lament, ironically singing that God may save the Queen and the lads, women and men, as they, then

…. pledge in peace by farm and town

to

… remember friends of ours

and continue the toil and joy

About the soil they trod

as they relish the living of it? 

Let God alone save the queens, kings, oligarchs and presidents, amidst their thieving, deadly trumpery.

http://genius.com/A-e-housman-1887-annotated

https://www.facebook.com/Chris-Wood-277202965744418/

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WATCHING MANCHESTER BY THE SEA

Watching the film Manchester By The Sea is like watching paint dry at times and then you realise the cinematic paint has dried and the picture it has formed is a masterpiece of story, character, location and emotion.

We are north of Boston, on the Massachusetts coast, where English names have long replaced the native American. Here is Essex, Gloucester, Beverly and Manchester-by-the-Sea, a tidy estuary town, surviving on seasonal resort activity, marine engineering, some fishing and the church, school and public administrative necessities of small town America. We come into the lives of the Chandler family: two brothers, their two wives and one of their sons. A web of relationships forms: father-son, brothers, husbands-wives, friends and neighbours. The key one is uncle-nephew.

At the core of the film is the visualisation of the old Stoic truism about life: stuff happens and then you die. Or, in this case, you live.

The matter becomes 'how do you live?'. The penultimate scene has the uncle, played in a blindingly marvellous performance by Casey Affleck and the nephew, aged sixteen and growing up fast, walking up a hill, bouncing a ball between them. It escapes them and the uncle, Lee Chandler, says 'let it go', but the boy picks it up once more, so that the bouncing and the climbing continue, in a modern day representation of the Sisyphus myth. As film metaphors go, this is hard to beat. It is not a rock the mere humans toil to push uphill, it is not a rock that permanently falls back, so that they must start again. It is a bouncy, rubber ball that escapes them. And then the young pick it up again.

There is so much to admire and enjoy in this film. The performances are terrific. The scene where Lee Chandler chances to meet - it is a small town, after all - his estranged wife, Randi, played expertly by Michelle Williams and they endure an aching, faltering conversation of broken gestures, appeals, half sentences and dodged eye-contact is a searing depiction of the limits of human empathy, in stark contrast to earlier scenes of blue-collar, boorish bliss the couple experienced.

This not Newport of High Society or the Cape Cod of the Kennedy's. This is blue-collar America, with Old Glory on the lawns of the clapboard houses, inhabited by old stock Anglo-Protestants and later Catholic immigrants. The young Chandler nephew, Paddy, asserts, towards the end of the film, that he is not going to college and he is not moving to Boston with his uncle. He likes his hometown. The final scene shows him and Uncle Lee fishing from the back of the boat they both love. They save the heart of the boat by putting in a new engine, financed by selling the prize guns held by Paddy's father, who's own heart let him down. That's a neat political point, one of a number, gently placed throughout the film.

And yet it is not all gentleness, no life is, certainly not the life Lee Chandler and his wider family experience. There is grief, rage and anger. We first meet Lee working as a janitor/handyman in apartment buildings in Boston, with demanding and sometimes irascible apartment owners, for whom he repeatedly performs menial tasks. He is the surly loner, who mumbles and scowls. He is the one person you would steer well clear off in a pub. Ironically, in that winter period of the film, the male sport of choice is ice-hockey. Paddy plays. Lee watches. And the players thump and wallop each other in ritualised acts of violence, that are, at one and the same time, a public venting of male violence and a gross display of male anger.

Nonetheless there is plenty of gentle humour, in particular in the efforts of Paddy, given a thrilling performance by Lucas Hedges, and other young people to grow up, literally, in the midst of the widespread youth experience of sex, drugs and rock-and-roll. Paddy says I got two girlfriends and I'm in a band and, while it's a witty line from a sixteen year old, the cinema-goer is left with a sense of 'here we go again'.

Could we have less of the sea-, town-, weather- and landscapes? Yes. Could the film be shorter? Yes. Could the time-line of winter to spring, hardness to life, be less obvious? Yes. Could the set-up, in Boston, before the move to Manchester-by-the-Sea, be a little brisker? Yes. Could the use of flash-back to tell the story be clearer? Yes, a little, though the method is generally successful, apart from one scene where the cinema-goer felt the action dipped into 'ghost' territory and confused Time briefly.

Overall, this is a masterful telling of commonplace stories and a masterful trawl through the contingency and persistence of human life and relationships, where grief and the facing of it in lived experiences forge the triumph that produces not neat resolutions but the wondrous raggedness of lived art. When Lee Chandler says I can't beat it. I can't beat it. I'm sorry, the cinema-goer is with him, and continues to be with him, long after the closing credits have faded and the screen and the world have faded to black.

http://www.imdb.com/title/tt4034228/

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READING A POEM A DAY 11 8.2.2017

SATCHMO

Melvin B. Tolson

King Oliver of New Orleans

has kicked the bucket, but he left behind

old Satchmo with his red-hot horn

to syncopate the heart and mind.

The honky-tonks in Storyville

have turned to ashes, have turned to dust,

but old Satchmo is still around

like Uncle Sam's IN GOD WE TRUST.

Where, oh, where is Bessie Smith,

with her heart as big as the blues of truth?

Where, oh, where is Mister Jelly Roll,

with his Cadillac and diamond tooth?

Where, oh, where is Papa Handy

With his blue notes a-dragging from bar to bar?

Where, oh where is bulletproof Leadbelly

with his tall tales and 12-string guitar?

Old Hip Cats,

when you sang and played the blues

the night Satchmo was born,

did you know hypodermic needles in Rome

couldn't hoodoo him away from his horn?

Wyatt Earp's legend, John Henry's, too,

is a dare and a bet to old Satchmo

when his groovy blues put headlines in the news

from the Gold Coast to cold Moscow.

Old Satchmo's

gravelly voice and tapping foot and crazy notes

set my soul on fire.

If I climbed

the seventy-seven steps of the Seventh

Heaven, Satchmo's high C would carry me higher!

Are you hip to this, Harlem? Are you hip?

On Judgement Day, Gabriel will say

after he blows his horn:

"I'd be the greatest trumpeter in the Universe

if old Satchmo had never been born!"

With sporadic rhymes and half-rhymes, in four stanzas that run to 8, 9 and 11 lines, both short and long, Melvin B. Tolson syncopates his way through the early history of 20^th Century jazz, name checking the early blues and jazz stars and coming to rest on Satchmo's High C, carrying the poet and the reader to the musical heaven of jazz. Close your eyes and hear the warmest, neatest treatment of New Orlean's jazz you're ever likely to hear.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O7S7gSZ0YRo

Bing Crosby sings “well, listen to, well, you know who?” and of course it's Satchmo, virtuousing out of the morass of the colour mix in mid-twentieth century America, with the white man leading and telling us what jazz music is while the black musicians play behind him and Satchmo himself takes a scat routine, achingly feminine and clownish. Be careful not to compare it to the monkey scene from Jungle Book, when the orang-utan shamelessly parodies the great maestro, Louis Armstrong, and asks to be made fully human. Tolson might ask if that means the ape wants to be 'white'?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9JDzlhW3XTM

Such parodies appear long after

King Oliver of New Orleans

has kicked the bucket, but he left behind

old Satchmo with his red-hot horn

to syncopate the heart and mind.

The red-hot horn that Tolson celebrates grew out of the honky-tonks now turned to dust and played crazy notes fit to set a poet's soul on fire.

Melvin B. Tolson is the famous African-American poet, teacher, academic and labour organiser, celebrated in Denzel Washington and Opray Winfrey's fine film The Great Debaters,

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IN2AGZThL-8

Tolson's poetry very often champions his sense of who he is and how his experience as an American of African descent charges him with an almost religious fervour for learning and justice. He urges Harlem, the locale of Africa in America to be hip to Satchmo's notes, carrying him higher, high enough to challenge the angels, even Gabriel himself, who admits he's second best when it comes to blowing that hot-horn, second best to a mere human, Satchmo.

The poem is a homage and a warning, in particular to the dangers of drugs he says were avoided by Satchmo

did you know hypodermic needles in Rome

couldn't hoodoo him away from his horn?

But the euphoria of Seventh Heaven awaits you if you are hip to this groovy blues, hip to this

gravelly voice and tapping foot and crazy notes

The patriotic note at the end of the first stanza

old Satchmo is still around

like Uncle Sam's IN GOD WE TRUST.

wonders if the Seventh Heaven Tolson is striving for is America, and if it has, like Bessie Smith a heart

as big as the blues of truth?

Tolson's poems are edited and collected by Raymond Nelson and Rita Dove in a University of Virginia Press publication. Recommended.

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