• Bodhisattvacharyavatara
    • Introduction
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    • Chapter 3
    • Chapter 4
    • Chapter 5
    • Chapter 6
    • Chapter 7
    • Chapter 8
    • Chapter 9
    • Chapter 10
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    • askance From Hell
    • Batman
    • The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford
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    • Edward Hopper: Poems at an Exhibition
    • David Bowie Movements in Suite Major
    • Eglinton Hill
    • FLOORBOARDS
    • Granada
    • in and out / the Avebury stones / can’t seem to get / a signal …
    • Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters]
    • Miller’s Batman
    • mum
    • nan
    • Portsmouth – Southsea
    • Spring Warwick breezes / over Bacharach fieldwork and boroughs with / the occasional shift and chirp of David / in the pastel-long morning of the sixties
    • through the crash
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mlewisredford

~ may the Supreme and Precious Jewel Bodhichitta take birth where it has not yet done so …

mlewisredford

Tag Archives: Manhattan

the policies came to nothing

19 Sunday Jun 2016

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

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Tags

2012, 5*, apartment, beauty, bittersweet, blue, buildings, business, cars, childhood, death, dizzy, emptiness, facade, gigantitude, height, looking, Manhattan, Mum, pink, reaching, roof, society, view, windows

 

 

 

                                          oh

                                   bittersweet beauty
                                   apartment window

                                   at any stage up the
                                   building façade                dizzy

                                   looking further up
                                   the top receding from

                                   view or yet dwarfed
                                   by another block kept

                                   in place by gigantitude
                                   everything kept in place

                                   by gigantitude; when
                                   young I had an image

                                   of a building so many
                                   floors high pinnacling

                                   to a turret roof and
                                   tiny cars going about

                                   their business, on the
                                   pink cover the blue

                                   cover of insurance
                                   policies my Mum kept,

                                   my mother dead now,
                                the policies came to nothing

 

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

beauty wormhole: 1967
blue & buildings & windows wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – A Bowl of Gourds
cars wormhole: fine
childhood & Manhattan wormhole: tired
death wormhole: The Boats of Vallesneria by Michael J. Redford – Autumn Thoughts
emptiness wormhole: the coffee shop opportunity
looking wormhole: tripping up to / London town
Mum wormhole: currency of generations
pink wormhole: Drug Store, 1927
roof wormhole: always
society wormhole: B le tch l ey P ark

 

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tired

17 Friday Jun 2016

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

≈ 2 Comments

Tags

'scape, 2012, 5*, ageing, childhood, city, evening, identity, lifetimes, light, Manhattan, money, people, power, roads, silhouette, sky, sound, sparrows, time, traffic, trees

                                                              tired

                                travelled
                a long time to arrive in New York, still the same person
                                roads
                still scraped and pockmarked since I wanted to come here as a teen;

                                trees
                still reach and lean in front of the sky,
                                city
                people still live and breathe the power of my money;

                                lights,
                go on in the evening and, between
                                traffic
                shoals, the sparrows bicker in the trees

 

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

childhood & evening wormhole: the coming of ‘The Boats of Vallisneria’ by Michael J. Redford
city wormhole: Drug Store, 1927
identity wormhole: tripping up to / London town
lifetimes wormhole: currency of generations
light & time wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – A Bowl of Gourds
Manhattan wormhole: 1964
money wormhole: teached / in the ass
people wormhole: The Boats of Vallisneria by Michael J. Redford – Contents
power wormhole: B le tch l ey P ark
roads wormhole: always
silhouette wormhole: 1967
sky & sound & trees wormhole: Lapping Reflections [Deep Within Waters] – autumn
sparrows wormhole: 1959 –– MANHATTAN –– 2012

 

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1964

10 Sunday Apr 2016

Posted by m lewis redford in poems, poeviews

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

1960s, 1964, 2014, angel, archetypes, beauty, Burt Bacharach, Diane di Prima, Dionne Warwick, dream, emptiness, feeling, hair, humanity, identity, imagination, life, light, lightning, lime, Manhattan, morning, myth, reality, San Francisco, shadow, streets, table, tectonic plates, the Summer of Love, time, walking, years

 

 

 

                           1964

                           she stood up from the
                           lime-green tablecloth we bought and walked
                           down through the streets
                           between morning shadows …

 

you’ll never get to heaven (if you break my heart): Dionne Warwick, Burt Bacharach, Hal David; soon after I posted this I sat down and had lunch (sultanas and banana in porridge) and read the following passage which was so apropos that I just had to add it to this work; it is by Diane di Prima, “Recollections of My Life as a Woman”, the beginning of chapter 19 – I haven’t asked permission (don’t know how to), but I just wanted to share it, it’s brilliant:

Certain times, certain epochs, live on in the imagination as more than what they ‘actually’ were, and there is always a price to pay for them.   They are, if you look close, times when the boundary between mythology and everyday life is blurred.   The archetypes break out of prison, as it were, and by some collective consent we or many of us, simply choose a myth and live it, heedless of the restrictions of the so-called ‘real world’.   Or we are somehow chosen by the myth we were born to live.   Sometimes with deadly rapidity.

This meeting of world and myth is where we all thought we were going.   Where we thought we wanted to be; it was so beautiful.   Vivid, bright, and deadly, like some tropical flowers.   Not human.   Not cut to our measure.

But we – we couldn’t see that.   Thought we were gods …

‘The 60s’ are often referred to as such a time, though what is usually meant by the term is merely ‘The Summer of Love’ and its aftermath: 1967 and 68.   Tip of the iceburg, if you ask me.

For me most of the 1960s, and on to about 1976, was a time bathed in the mythic.   It was a time when the archetypes stalked the streets of Manhattan, numinous and often deadly.   When angels, incubi, and other dreams of what could be settled in your hair and refused to be brushed aside.   When we see the creatures that lived in the fog worlds of San Francisco as casually as you see your corner grocery.

                                                      .

We had struggled so long and so furiously to find, reach into, the world of our feelings, our secret knowledges, and intuitions, and it was as if Something had caught us up, caught the hand we had slipped through the gap, and that Something was now pulling us in.   Pulling us under.   For as certainly as we knew that behind the facades our parents had lived there was the world of human feeling, behind that world was yet another that sought to claim us.   What I have called the World of Archetypes.   Inexorable bundles of soul purpose, often wearing human or humanoid form, sometimes walking among us.   Without conscience and without regret.   And so beautiful!

As I can tell you now, behind the Archetypes are vast impersonal patterns or textures of energies we might call Orisha.   Or Yidam.

And behind that, perhaps the Void dances, not black, cold, or empty as we have believed, but dancing with light, sheet lightnings spread as a series of surfaces over nothing.   And moving faster than the eye can register.   Even the eye of the mind.

Our downfall was – it was so beautiful.   For us, who had replaced religion, family, society, ethics with Beauty, who saw ourselves as in the service of Beauty, no warnings were understood, no traps anticipated.   To go down in the servive of That – that was the ultimate grace.

But archetypes have their own drama: a vast uncharted cycle of Comedia dell’Arte, which they play out through us, without our informed concent.   And with, ultimate, no concern for human purpose.

And it is not without reason that we have been handed by the science of our time the image, the fact or metaphor, of tectonic plates.   Earth continents floating on a core of molten magma.   As we ourselves float, melting a little, changing shape.   Bumping against each other, lifted by, dependent on, in total chemical exchange with, the molten soul stuff I have here called Archetypes.   That seeks to brek through to the surface wherever the plates are thin.

The plates were very thin in 1964.

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

1964 wormhole: sixty four sixty five – poewieview #1
beauty wormhole: [s]
[Burt] Bacharach wormhole: 1963
Dionne Warwick wormhole: nothing to write
dream wormhole: dream career // groggy
emptiness & walking wormhole: and that’s where I are
hair wormhole: Shonagh – poewieview #17
identity wormhole: rhymed
Manhattan wormhole: 1959 –– MANHATTAN –– 2012
life wormhole: mauve
light wormhole: don’t look / at her eyes – poewieview #18
lightning wormhole: first Spring storm
lime wormhole: thick thick fog
morning wormhole: hinged – From Hell ch. V
reality wormhole: top table
shadow wormhole: up on the hill
streets wormhole: tabla
table wormhole: Soir Bleu, 1914
time wormhole: a theremin note – poewieview #21
years wormhole: the sounds of 1969 // [would have] seemed that way – poewieview #13

 

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1959 –– MANHATTAN –– 2012

15 Thursday Jan 2015

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

≈ 14 Comments

Tags

10*, 1959, 1960s, 2012, 2015, 99/1, abandonment, air, airport, America, anxiety, apricot, art deco, avenue, beauty, bedroom, birdsong, blossom, blue, books, branches, breathing, buildings, business, Carol, Central Park, charcoal, childhood, choice, clothes, clouds, coffee, coffee shop, compromise, crane, Dad, divorce, dog, dream, Eglinton Hill, evening, eyebrow, eyes, falling, fashion, floodlights, Ford Anglia, freedom, furniture, ghosts, glamour, Glasgow, green, grey, haiku, hair, Have, history, horizon, hotel, identity, life, lifetimes, light, lilac, living, London, looking, love, magazine, Manhattan, marble, Mini, mist, money, morning, Mum, music, New York, obligation, pastel, people, phone, pink, plane, posture, radar, reaching, reading, roads, sadness, sidewalk, sitting, sky, smile, society, sound, space, sparrows, speech, spotlights, Steely Dan, streetlight, sun, sunlight, talking, taxi, terrace, texting, time, traffic, traffic lights, train, travelling, trees, uniform, waiting, walking, walls, walnut, white, wind, windows, work, years, yellow

                                          1959 –– MANHATTAN –– 2012

                                straight out from school to Heathrow on the M25
                                a network of lonely roads going nowhere, then;
                                waiting, studying coffee highlights in the green
                                lobby with blue spotlights and pillared space for

                                phones to pace up and down and talk it still is,
                                loudly; at the next hotel we wait with more spot-
                                lights in our eyes no matter where we sit; furniture
                                deco-curved and just off right-angle, held together,

                                material to wood, for decades with check-
                                pattern and slight stain; there is a locked-in-
                                ness in our world on all sides which only our
                                future eyes – that never look directly – betray

                                in their gaze; early flight tomorrow; in the
                                morning-effect light shifting, the mist hanging
                                around the base of the sky, land spread with
                                low buildings always on the horizon, flat and

                                matt, before the sun flanks their edges into 3D,
                                radar-spinning, floodlights turn off, arms of
                                cranes hold their reach, and … the control
                                tower; 3567 miles and I didn’t bring enough

                                books (you can never bring enough books);
                                I travelled for lifetimes to arrive in New York,
                                still the same person: roads scraped and pock-
                                marked, trees still reach and lean in front of the

                                sky, people still live city life breathing in and
                                out the power of my money, lights still go on
                                in the evening and in between traffic shoals
                                the sparrows bicker in the trees; in room 506

                                over Central Park, already I am familiar with
                                the lore of the branch, the places-to-go apricot
                                street lights, the white path lights, the traffic
                                lights and the ‘cheeps’ bounced off building wall

                                between the lmmmdmda-lmmmdmda – laersssh
                                through the rain-dusty windows, under grey-sky
                                steel-clouds and the slowly shifting charcoal; but
                                then there is always the next day, the ever-waiting

                                gulp-open and blue-chip sorry of impressionistic
                                sidewalk, the walnut marble frontages walking
                                south up into downtown in cold air between
                                buildings and didn’t bring enough clothes (I never

                                know what clothes to bring) – by Radio City ‘with a
                                transistor and a large sum of money to spend’;
                                everything created for living beyond subsistence
                                everything produced at cost through labour

                                everything earned through labour if you can get it
                                everything obtained at price and compromise
                                everything experienced at cost through trademark
                                everything Had, but no one left to have it …

                                everything that is uneasy in the modern day
                                was manufactured behind the half-closed blinds
                                of America – home of the Potential and Slave –
                                and yet … it is so sad-beautiful: the space sculpted

                                by façades of apartment blocks giant arm-widths
                                apart, communities of single window – italicised
                                nib–scratches – stepped upwards and backwards
                                the Avenues of Uprise reaching higher and

                                lower again and again and again; America has
                                so much condensed history since it braved the
                                conceit and responsibility, of choice: cleansed
                                by ethnically assimilating, pledged by conforming

                                allegiance; Someone had to make a stand against
                                all this equivocation and by God Almighty We
                                Made   that   Stand; `made continental infrastructure
                                out of it, far bigger far more reaching even than

                                law and democracy … … but there is such
                                width in your sadness – lilac blossom before
                                marble façade; such height in your sadness –
                                giddy out on the balconies looking eight floors more

                                above; such blank in your sadness – when you
                                skip my English joke and call ‘you’re welcome’
                                from the till; such sadness when you ask for
                                change outside Starbucks; even the trees through

                                the hotel window, even the wide sidewalk cleaned
                                for strolling and not curbing, even the smiling
                                doorman in brown suit … all Had; all kept
                                in place by gigantitude, everything kept in place

                                by gigantitude, (when I was young an image
                                of a building so many floors high pinnacling to a
                                turret roof on the pink cover on the blue cover
                                of the insurance policies that my Mum kept;

                                my mother is now dead the policies came to
                                nothing); 99: “for all the freedom and choice to
                                be Had, life is hard when you pay with your work
                                and no time left and no money to choose

                                leaves you tired with no sense of humour”;
                                1: “for all the freedom and choice to be Had
                                life is anxiety where you pay for with your
                                history and obligation, never stopped still-

                                enough to choose, leaves you always with
                                dyed hair; look, only on the fifth floor of the
                                Eldorado, a man at the window canary short-
                                sleeve shirt turns back into the room, traffic light

                                booms out on a long arm swinging slightly taxis
                                u-turn as the sun comes up from behind; women’s
                                magazines, waiting for Mum at the hairdresser’s
                                in the mid-sixties, illustrations, young tree avenues,

                                blossoming handbags, little dogs on leash, promise
                                of love, promise of life, promise of man’s jaw in
                                boardroom where cologne cinches the deal, slight
                                smile signs the papers: maybe later some chinos

                                and open collar on the terrace; there was a calendar
                                brought home from work (“not needed … we work
                                in London”) – buildings of Manhattan, can decorate
                                my room, make my world, all the stepped down

                                walls of windows up which b-e-y-o-n-d myself
                                giddy and beautiful, I cannot look up or down but
                                keep them high on the wall; going out in the
                                evening Daddy ‘have to’ ‘to do with work’ ‘can’t be

                                helped’ white shirt bow-tie, clean-cut neck cologne
                                ‘good for contacts’ ‘if I can, just’ ‘business’; there
                                was a new white Mini, a new white Anglia parked
                                outside on the hill over London, Matchbox models

                                to match for the boys, going into ‘business’ ‘make
                                a go’ Dennis & Dennis, home, evening drinks, meet
                                the family, the boys play Dennis G and Dennis P
                                for years after; ‘… Daddy is leaving, he will not be

                                coming back’; I had thought it was all pastel-blue-
                                and-grey beautiful but the glamour got to him first
                                and now I dream of falling off balconies and ledges,
                                (do I fall up or down); evening: ghouls from the

                                subway gaining and pushing but the top trees-only
                                gently leaning, hybrids swashing yellow down the
                                tarmac in schools while the thunder of a plane
                                descends; morning: eyebrows raise like coving, the

                                reggae lingers      then kicks in; a neat rhombus of
                                sunlight unconcerned across her cheek, a blind rolls
                                down, ‘I’ll just read a chapter’-fixed lashes, the
                                rhombus travelling now across collar bones between

                                her white collars; Carol reads far better than me,
                                she reads history as it happens, she is the ‘captain-
                                speaking’, she knows what time it is      in other
                                countries, she knows there is no airport in Glasgow

                                (she also bullshits when cornered); now I miss all of
                                this, I see only peoples’ posture contrary to their
                                eyes, and little else; I came to Manhattan and saw
                                your avenues of strange displacement your streets

                                of darkness and morning-side; I found I was there
                                a lifetime ago, but you left me and I have moved on
                                now and I shall not be back, there is no need;
                                I shall celebrate your strange beauty from afar;

                                Newark Airport: everybody here / is talking all
                                the time to / someone somewhere else; the control
                                room sits            overhanging on the concrete stem,
                                fingers of cloud float nonchalantly by, with no delays

                                today, two girls study magazines, swap articles,
                                a third texts constantly with fixed smirk; but you,
                                you are so beautiful with hennaed hair braided
                                neatly back because you are in uniform, you are

                                taking a break, ID and equipment around your
                                neck, clear dark skin, grey shirt and St. John’s
                                badge eating a bag     of crisps with eyebrows sharp
                                and eyes so white looking, not talking     looking

 

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

abandonment & streetlight wormhole: dawn
air wormhole: just
anxiety & Carol & crane & Have & lifetimes & London & love & pink & sky & train & travelling & white & work wormhole: new year’s eve 2014; train up to London to / walk the bridges across the Thames, and / listen to the voices say it is, and was, like, / but get back home before the fireworks / obliterate it all in the emptying twilight
apricot wormhole: only
beauty wormhole: smiling
bedroom wormhole: sunny morning
blossom & branches & waiting wormhole: I could step / more open
blue & grey & mist & trees & walking wormhole: right to be
books wormhole: a light rosé
breathing & life & speech wormhole: living mystery / murder theatre
buildings & identity & society & space & windows wormhole: where the real action // always is
childhood & dream & Eglinton Hill & ghosts & green & looking & morning & time wormhole: tag cloud poem VIII – growth
clouds & light & posture wormhole: Buddha Amitabha
coffee wormhole: poised patiently for / hours
coffee shop wormhole: yet another sprain / of ‘Jingle Bells’ straining / to propagate yet another / tired Christmas spirit – … / ‘sanner clawsis coming t’ taunn – yeah’ in a / coffee shop with condensation / running off the snowflake transfers / and the iphone at the next table / talking how 50 means 900 a month – not worth / the drive (left his scarf behind – / collateral) … about my age
compromise wormhole: Dr Strange V – all the words of all the times of all the worlds speak
Dad & traffic lights & yellow wormhole: ‘“Never,” said the Sandman; / he blinked …’
dog wormhole: silence
evening wormhole: lobby
eyes wormhole: great underbelly to the rooftops
haiku(esque) & hair & Manhattan & people & roads wormhole: Kirby’s landscapes
history wormhole: 20th century / schzoid man
horizon wormhole: Dr Strange I – the trashcan tilted the better to see now the street
hotel wormhole: the Last Day of Morecambe Illuminations
lilac wormhole: Herbert Road diptych
living & sitting & sound & sun wormhole: crumpled / notebooks / at the end of a gentle retreat
money wormhole: The Future of Teaching: performance or capability (‘oh, not ‘teaching’ then?’)
Mum wormhole: letters to Mum V – carrying on in duty and love
music & reading wormhole: sometimes
obligation wormhole: scattered
smile wormhole: the silent night of the Batman
sparrows wormhole: zazen in everyday life
spotlights wormhole: ‘the dining room …’
talking wormhole: – sigh! –
walls wormhole: Plumstead – Woolwich 121114
wind wormhole: Christmas

 

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Kirby’s landscapes

19 Friday Dec 2014

Posted by m lewis redford in poems, poeviews

≈ 3 Comments

Tags

'scape, 2014, 6*, bridge, buildings, fashion, gold, haiku, hair, head, iron, Jack Kirby, Manhattan, pavement, people, reaching, river, roads, rooftops, seeing, shadow, sky, stone, streets, trees, vertical

 

 

 

                                  Kirby’s landscapes

                                 among the street trees
                           and trouser shadows people
                              struggle with fashion

                                           but few look to the
                           rooftops where the reach of arm
                                can span neighbourhoods

                              and monuments, stacked
                           to pinnacle bricked to stand,
                              the lens is mistrust-

                                         worthy – the shift of
                           golden hair – between the streets
                                and blocks of façade

                            where bridges raise the
                           access, lower the canyon
                            to the river that

                                        knows no busy-ness
                           ranged wide along its banks and
                               harbours, failure to

                            see this tips buildings
                           beyond the vertical, you
                            cannot have angle

                                  on a pavement on
                           a road, elegant stonework
                              curling ironwork

                                     won’t allow it while
                           the hats of heads vie with sky
                              line, you see, billboards

                                           and water towers
                           have been made redundant but
                                they had class and style

 

most of the images for this were reaped and harvested from The Fantastic Four #95, February 1970; plot: Stan Lee; art and storytelling: Jack Kirby; it was only after I put the finishing touches to the ‘billboards’ and ‘water towers’ in the last stanza that I realised it was all ABOUT Jack Kirby; have a lookit: this; and, maybe, also … this:

 

ff95pg8

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

bridge wormhole: dream / 150599
buildings & sky wormhole: Dr Strange V – all the words of all the times of all the worlds speak
gold wormhole: Christmas
haiku(esque) wormhole: ‘the blues shifted …’
hair wormhole: knees
Manhattan wormhole: introducing / the stranger
people wormhole: smiling
river & shadow & streets wormhole: Plumstead – Woolwich – Plumstead 290508 – / the breath of London
roads wormhole: bass and piano
rooftops wormhole: never there
seeing wormhole: Dr Strange I – the trashcan tilted the better to see now the street
stone wormhole: the precision // the gentleness // and / the letting go
trees wormhole: Plumstead – Woolwich 121114

 

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introducing / the stranger

10 Thursday Jul 2014

Posted by m lewis redford in poems, poeviews

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

2013, 5*, buildings, comics, grey, humanity, Kirby, lime, Manhattan, people, power, sky, society, walking, X-Men

 

 

 

                           introducing
                           the Stranger

                from out of the moody towers of Manhattan
                     that recess
                then reach even higher for to fill the sky

                                                      because it’s there

                     ever walks the stranger a metre above ground
                the true emergence from grey
                     building, crowd and truck

                fine contrast in lime shirt and tie
                     to which all the ingenuity
                and desperate colour of humanity has

                     no response

 

 

originally published on The Poetry Jar, April 12th 2013, thanks to Bruce Ruston

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

buildings wormhole: emerged
comics wormhole: quest in brown
grey wormhole: open window
lime wormhole: multifarious: the Dark Knight Returns (1986)
Manhattan wormhole: rear attic / bedroom
people & society wormhole: titanic
power wormhole: across the room / through the patio doors / through the conservatory windows / at the bottom of the garden / the still bifurcated trunk of / the oak / before the let-grown hair and fringes / of the fir tree / blown every lifetime in a while by the winter sun // actually
sky wormhole: there
walking wormhole: letters to Mum I – a walk / and talk

 

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rear attic / bedroom

25 Thursday Oct 2012

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

≈ 4 Comments

Tags

'scape, 2012, 5*, bedroom, beige, childhood, curtains, Eglinton Hill, Manhattan, pink, radio, sun, walnut, white, windows

 

 

 

                                                      rear attic
                                                      bedroom

                                          in
                           through the
            smallpalepinkflowersonwhiteandbeige curtains
                           shaft of aslant sunlight
                           fanthening strip by strip along
                           the slighty embossed wallpaper
                           of the attic window alcove
                           until the edge of the inward-sloping
                           ceiling

                                          then
                           I whine to be picked out of the cot
                           I worry the railings the catch that holds
                           but don’t understand
                           but no one comes
                           so I notice the walnut record player and radio
                           stored away and standing like a
                           Manhattan apartment building

 

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

a room in the House on Eglinton Hill
bedroom wormhole: the open window
beige wormhole: ‘dirty beige …’
childhood & Eglinton Hill & pink wormhole: there
curtains wormhole: snow and incense
Manhattan wormhole: travel writing
radio wormhole: radio
sun & white wormhole: sun low / from behind
windows wormhole: evening

 

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travel writing

27 Sunday May 2012

Posted by m lewis redford in announcements

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

4*, Castleton, growth, Manhattan, Philip Whalen, sitting, travelling, writing

I recently travelled to Manhattan.   First time to America.   Have wanted to go all my life.   Gift from my wife.   Thank you.   While there (only three days) I wrote a whole flutter of poems – I knew I would, I wanted to.   Manhattan 2012 And then I noticed that I’m tapping into a deep vein of writing every time I travel.   In 2011 I stayed a week in Castleton, Derbyshire – a whole whelter of work, 37 poems, some of them were fine (‘how ‘do), others experimented and found some very interesting forms – Have.   Went up to London recently, only for the day – a whole wadge of poems.   Very satisfying.   Maybe I can write.

What is it about travelling and writing that I cannot do at home?   Why do I write more and freshly when travelling?   Here comes a theory: because when travelling out of local it is relatively and comparatively new.   Because it is new my reactions and observations are fresher.   And if I am alert to them I have the material with which to write.   I don’t have to compose, I just have to transcribe.   The key is in the alert rather than just the travelling.   If you are alert to the mind – to your experience, to your mind’s noticing of the tabs and particulars and profiles of your experience – then you have the material to show the experience as fresh and unique as it is.   If you can write you have the skill to show the experience as fresh and unique as it is      to others.

grey air       ‘the happy Taoist practising …’       loud music

I wandered across an article on Philip Whalen today which noticed that he made use of and incorporated what his mind noticed in his vicinity while he was writing the poem.   And if you work your way into his poems there is a vivid sense of geographical location in them.   Even if he is just cogitating on something there is ‘geographical’ syntax in the actual chatty, rambling, correcting words he uses – you enter into his breathing mind so much that you end up thinking his poems rather than just reading them.

So must I travel in order to write?   Sometimes I can be alert in completely familiar surroundings – my study: place of hope, anxiety and boredom! ‘after an hour …’ – and produce just as fresh writing as breathing the mist and lights at an airport early in the morning (Heathrow Airport).   The key is in the alert.   I have often thought that there is an intimate connection between training in awareness and the development of writing.   You can’t develop your writing without training your awareness, you can’t train your awareness … without sitting (well you can, but it’s bloody difficult, much too much distraction).   It is not a co-dependent connection – writing and awareness – but it is intimate.

siting and writting       ‘when sitting I am just sitting maybe …’       even though

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

Manhattan & travelling wormhole: ‘writing creatively …’
sitting & writing wormhole: so

 

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‘writing creatively …’

12 Thursday Apr 2012

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

2012, 4*, flow, growth, Manhattan, sitting, smile, travelling, writing

 

 

 

writing creatively
is finding a locale that is
fresh and uncertain
and stepping back enough
to catch the flow of the new

the easiest way to do this
is to travel the cheaper way
is to learn how to sit …

… so alighted where I are
for the whole journey
that I get a suntan
from my smile

 

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

Manhattan wormhole: ‘I came to Manhattan and saw …’
sitting wormhole: slowly
smile wormhole: table
travelling wormhole: ‘travelled a long time …’
writing wormhole: there

 

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‘I came to Manhattan and saw …’

10 Tuesday Apr 2012

Posted by m lewis redford in poems

≈ 1 Comment

Tags

'scape, 2012, 4*, avenue, beauty, growth, lifetimes, Manhattan, streets

 

 

 

            I came to Manhattan and saw
            your avenues of strange displacement
            your streets of darkness and morningside

            I found that I was there a lifetime ago
            but you left me and
            I have moved on now

            I shall not be back
                     there is no need
            I shall celebrate your strange beauty
                     from afar

 

 

 

————w(O)rmholes________________________________|—–

lifetimes wormhole: ‘the worm …’
Manhattan wormhole: I’ll just read a chapter
streets wormhole: blue walnut

 

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