Sunday

He said: For sport I'll write a villanelle,
With verses five and quatrain at the end
And it, with style and wit, shall rhyme as well.

One Sunday morning, caught in boredom's spell
and looking, sad, at other lines he'd penned
He said: For sport I'll write a villanelle.

A story, neatly bound in form, I'll tell
And to that form, the meaning will I bend
And it, with style and wit, shall rhyme as well.

Two lines refraining, tolling, as a bell
will call my reader always to attend
He said. For sport, I'll write a villanelle.

It shall be tragic, magic, fay and fell
And through, a wistful wantonness shall wend
And it, with style and wit, shall rhyme as well.

Without a muse, the poem's just a shell,
But form still serves the poet in the end.
He said: For sport I'll write a villanelle,
And it, with style and wit, shall rhyme as well.

Tim Robinson  27/11/2010

Wednesday night, piano night.

This week at least...

Seeing everyone else at home had their things to do, and I can get to the grand piano in the church down the road on evenings when there's a club meeting in the adjacent hall... I sloped off after dinner to spend an hour at a decent keyboard.

I always feel a bit naughty playing from Pictures at an Exhibition in a church (Don't get too excited, I play it all veeery slow). In particular Gnomus and The Hut on Chicken's Legs seem a bit too devilish for the space, so I stumbled through the first Promenade and then stuck to Beethoven and Chopin, cleaning my hands with little bits of Bach in between.

Chopin I tend to read through over and again in the hope that my fingers will one day just do it without my having to put in any effort. Beethoven is great when you just want to revel in the range of sound you can make. but Bach I could pick a piece and play the same one over and over and over again.

Actually that's pretty much what I did... I'm now really good at the Cmajor prelude from book two of the 48 preludes and fugues. I've been playing it over and over again for about 10 years now... My wife hates it. But... I'm ashamed to admit I only got really good at it in the last few months when I finally decided to pull it apart, play it separate hands, work out the phrasing, and generally try to play "that melody" over "that bass" instead of "all those notes". Having only now discovered what this does (I wish I'd been humble enough to take the time ten years ago) I was suddenly able to make sense of the fugue that follows it and also to do less damage to the Cminor prelude and fugue. Now I'm working on the Dmajor prelude.

This is Sviatoslav Richter playing The Cmajor prelude and fugue.




In the prelude you have two play two instrumental lines with each hand. If you just play "all those notes", especially with the in the right hand, you miss the opportunity to bring out a wonderful interchange between the top two lines. Richter does a nice job of this. If you browse through youtube for BWV870 and compare him to the likes of Ashkenazy and Glenn Gould you'll see what I consider to be the wrong way to play this piece. Instead of bringing out the conversation between the parts which makes me love this piece, they seem to hash them all together and make the right hand sound like one very complicated but rather boring melody.

Now, I like my version even better than Richter's. Why shouldn't I? It makes perfect sense that I should be more likely to play a piece of music in the way I like best than anybody else... even if they are famous.

What I would like to do over the next year or so is to get hold of a suitable video camera and start making my own recordings and sharing them on here.

To the people who stole out of my car on the weekend

Even though you probably will never read this... Please give my stuff back.

There was a bag of hand tools, a hitachi sander my mum bought for me, a fly reel and a little aluminium case of hand tied trout flies, and a new pair of workboots. All up there was probably less than a grand worth to replace but I don't have a grand and my contents insurance doesn't cover anything used at any time to earn an income.

The tools and the boots I'll probably be able to replace bit by bit over time.  But I have a close relationship with my stuff, many of the items were gifts and nearly every item has an association of memory attached to it.

What really made me sad was the fishing tackle.  I don't fish by the way.  The trout reel belonged to my Dad.  He died in 1998 or there abouts.  It was his favourite reel, I think, I don't know how much he used it.  I think he'd had it when he was a boy in the 1930's and 40's when his father taught him to keep his arm still and cast only with his wrist by getting him to grip the family bible between his elbow and his waist.  The family Bible was huge, and letting it touch the ground was a whipping offence.

The reel itself showed years of use.  It had a notch worn in where the line had rubbed from years of winding, and that notch was worn into new metal brazed on to repair an earlier groove.  Maybe it was so old as to be no use for fishing anymore and maybe that was the reason my brother pressed it into my hand on the day of the funeral saying I should have something of Dad's. (I got that, the flies and his swandri hat - which my wife won't let me wear.  You didn't take the hat.)  It was a name brand of reel.  It might have been a Hardy's, I can't remember.  It might be worth something as a collectible.  Maybe you'll get a hundred bucks for it.

The flies probably aren't worth much.  You might get fifty bucks for them. Dad tied them himself from feathers the neighbours peacock dropped and from bits off our various pet chooks that he kept in a little drawer in the desk along with other bits like possum fur, copper wire, thread and glue.  He'd sit late at night under the green painted desk lamp with his glasses pushed down to the tip of his nose, bent over the fly-tying vice that I always thought was so cool. He was meticulous in all his movements whether he was tying a fly, repairing a cane rod or rebinding the handle of a cricket bat.  Each individual twist of feather or thread was so practised it seemed staged.  Even if he didn't know you were watching it was like a performance.  Maybe he knew I was watching, showing me how it was done as I stood in the doorway behind him in my pyjamas. Or maybe he was still doing it just right for his own father - keeping the bible off the ground.

Anyway... that's what you took from me... I know I know I should have made sure the kids had locked their door... and I should have checked my insurance ages ago too.

All that's left is for me to have this little whinge... and move on.

The Gedle

I know, I know... That was a terrible poem

But that's precisely the reason I like it. For me it's terrible for all the right reasons and none of the wrong ones. And, as I said, I wanted my first ever blog post to be something I could always improve on.  The blame for that poem,  if blame must be laid, lies firmly with whoever put a bunch of Spike Milligan books on the bookshelves when I was a child.

I don't understand poetry at all by the way.  I've written a few arrangements of words on the page and called them poems since that first one.  Back in  2000ish I even sat an undergraduate course in Poetry writing, for which I scored a final mark of  "A+".  That didn't mean any of it was publishable of course, and looking back on those poems now I tend to agree with the people who told me so at the time.  That doesn't mean that I won't at times publish the odd few verses here if and when the mood takes me.

If you did ask me what I thought poetry was, however, I would say that any poem is a sort of mnemonic.  Like Roy G. Biv reminds us the order of the colours of the rainbow; like "first class goods do an excellent business" tells us in which order to place sharps in a key signature, a poem acts like a mnemonic aid to clearly call to mind an event, an image, a feeling, or a state of mind. 

Of course this function of poetry which I (have decided to) call mnemonic is more subtle and complex than the simple memory aids we remember from science and music classes.  The triggers for memory or understanding in poetry come from the combination of sounds in the chosen words, the particular images evoked by metaphor and sometimes the coherence or lack of coherence of the language used.  As with mnemonics as we understand them, without any key to understanding a poem may be meaningless to anybody except its author.

This reminds me. My poem needs a better title. Does anybody have a suggestion?

There. Having disavowed any understanding of poetry I have gone on to attempt to explain it.  I'm afraid this is what you will come to expect of me. 

All the best
The Gedle

Hello World!

In order to begin any journey, one must first establish a point, however lowly from which to begin.  With this in mind I here publish my first serious poem, written around 1998.  While I am no longer in possession of the original manuscript of this poem, the words are emblazoned firmly on my conciousness and still speak to me on some deep level even now.  They capture the circumstances surrounding their creation succinctly, and, while twelve years is a long time in the modern world I think this poem still has very much something to say.

Thattered Scoughts

The rain pelts, heavily upon my architrave
I wish it would not so...
I scream! but still the giddy knave
Bombards my woodwork etc.

Shun ye the hellhound's rainy ranks
That endlessly pour forth.
They rain on cars they rain on banks
And also noisome Geriatrica

Yea Geriatrica I say to thee
They live upon the hill...
...and piercingly glare down on me
Whilst I prepare my famous curries

That issue forth with fiery glee
E'en after they be consum-ed
A ring of flame that's hard to see
by all but those famed contortionists

Who with the fabled toasting chant*
To the rain to cool the scorch,
And skyward Cyclops' faces slant,
More soothed than if they'd used Optrex.

I think there is a message in there for all of us, don't you?

* "bottoms up"