Skip to main content

Posts

Showing posts from September, 2012

Book City (Vitezslav Nezval)

There are times in our life of reading where the book seems more than the squarish paper object that presents the information. Times when the book, through the transformative process of intent reading, becomes something other, something strange or new or mysterious or intensely desirable, simply through its effect on imagination. Times when awake world and dream world merge in the process of reading the book, so that where we were before and where we might be afterwards have been suspended by the experience of reading. Such is the effect being elucidated (if that is the word) in the wondrous poem ‘Book City’ by the Czech poet Vitezslav Nezval. Without the book we could not enter into the other world that the book evokes. Then also, the very existence of books is a reality of our world. Books confront us with their presence. Books are objects of desire. Books meet us with their own beauty, their own possibilities and demands. Their very existence tests our self-awareness, our ps

Prague with Fingers of Rain (Vitezslav Nezval)

When reading histories of Prague the modern poet named more consistently and enthusiastically than any other is Vitezslav Nezval (1900-1958). His 1936 collection ‘Prague with Fingers of Rain’ in particular seems to have a hold on the people of that city and its historians. Fingers are the subject, object and verb of the opening poem, ‘City of Spires’: Hundred-spired Prague With the fingers of all saints With the fingers of perjury With the fingers of fire and hail With the fingers of a musician With the intoxicating fingers of women lying on their backs With fingers touching the stars On the abacus of night Nezval is reminding us of all those, living and dead, who have lived in and built Prague, in keeping you might say with the ideological and literary expectations of his socialism. However, nature and its product the city also have fingers: With fingers deformed by rheumatism With fingers of strawberries With the fingers of windmills and blossoming l

The O-seal-that-so feature

The only thing better than reading a good poem is re-reading a good poem. Listening to the words of Gerard Manley Hopkins is to encounter in a small space a mind eager to make us aware of marvels. Aware, more aware, totally aware. It should be the hallmark of any writer of ecology that they reveal marvels. For although skyscrapers of scientific data should be enough to activate humans to protect the natural world, a more certain cause is to instil wonder. In his diary for April 8 th 1873, Hopkins wrote, “The ashtree growing in the corner of the garden was felled. It was lopped first: I heard the sound and looking out and seeing it maimed there came at that moment a great pang and I wished to die and not see the inscapes of the world destroyed anymore.” Inscape was one of his coinages, typical of a man who developed private theories to assist his thinking and writing. It means the thisness or whatness of anything, Duns Scotus called it quiddity, those characteristics of

The Walk (Seamus Heaney)

This poem was read aloud at Janet Campbell’s funeral in Hamilton in Victoria in December 2006. Janet was a great lover of poetry all her life, a great reader of poetry, and she read everything of Seamus Heaney. Indeed, when she worked in Melbourne or London bookshops Janet would grab hold of Faber pre-publication copies of Heaney if they came into the backroom, and disappear for days, copying lines onto postcards for her friends, transferring lines into her lifetime of diaries. Diaries that were also a lifeline. Janet read everything, but Heaney was one of the regulars. Seamus Heaney keeps a tight line. He is rarely though completely opaque and the way into this poem is the word ‘longshot’. We only find in the second of the two poems that we are being asked to look at two photographs. Or, at least, poems that are like photographs. Or, better still, strong memories that have taken on in the mind the nature of longshots. The two poems in one are reminders of close relationships.

The Death of the Author (James Joyce)

The Death of the Author Lately Written by the Author for Three Voices: Obituarist    OB Ulysses   UL Wakese FW Collagist: Philip Harvey Performed at La Notte Ristorante in Lygon Street as part of the Bloomsday in Melbourne celebrations on 16 th of June 2011 [The MC will explain during the Introduction that in this reading questionable statements in the Obituary passages will be followed by a gong. Straight factual errors will be followed by the blowing of a paper whistle. Typos in the original text will be underscored by the soft playing of a music box. Patrons are asked to pay close attention for these occasions. A musician plays gong, paper whistle, and music box, as directed in the script.] OB: The New York Times, January 1941. Zurich, Switzerland, Monday, Jan 13- James Joyce, Irish author whose "Ulysses" was the center of one of the most bitter literary controversies of modern times, died in a hospital here early today despite the efforts of doc

Playing with Thistlewords (James Joyce)

PLAYING WITH THISTLEWORDS: TODAY’S LINGUiSTIC ANATOMY LECTURE A theatre piece and reading of Finnegans Wake, written by Philip Harvey and delivered by Juliette Hughes at Bloomsday in Melbourne, 2006. [Lecturer, model and graffitist. Lecturer speaks from podium. Model represents the anatomy, and his features are pointed at by the lecturer with her pointer. Graffitist can be on far end of stage, or somewhere, spray-painting the name of each feature onto huge sheets of butcherpaper as the feature is named. The titles of each section are not read out; they simply serve as eye cues for the lecturer.] THE EAR = LISTENING For the Clearer of the Air from on high has spoken in tumbuldum tambaldam to his tembledim tombaldoom worrild and, moguphonised by that phonemanon, the unhappitents of the earth have terrerumbled from firmament unto fundament and from tweedledeedumms down to twiddledeedees. Which brings us straight to the point. Today I intend to explain, by

Awkward Reverence

Awkward Reverence : the Little World of Philip Larkin Article written by Philip Harvey for the ANZTLA Newsletter and first published in 2005 Philip Larkin (1922-1985) was a large round man with a round bald head and large oblong spectacles. He is about one of the most well-known English poets of the reign of Elizabeth II, and although not as accomplished as the most well-known poet under Elizabeth I, will be in the anthologies as long as English poetry survives. He was a member of a writing circle in the 1950s called the Movement. Its literary values, agenda even, is put well in a letter of the time: “For my part I feel we have got the method right – plain language, absence of posturings, sense of proportion, humour, abandonment of the dithyrambic ideal – and are waiting for the matter: a fuller and more sensitive response to life as it appears from day to day, and not only on Mediterranean holidays financed by the British Council.”1 This has sometimes been called kitchen s