Bus from Bodega: poetry

I spent the weekend at a workshop in Bodega Bay, and spent the drive home chatting to a friend, for a time about poems and things, and he wanted links to some that I mentioned. But why write an email when you can blog? And why write a list of links when you can correct some of your initial errors and point out the other interesting things you have learned relating to the links and then write some more stuff after that? So here are some poems and facts and random related things that interest me.

The Isles of Greece by Lord Byron—introduced to me by S ages ago but I only came to really like it recently. I read it aloud to myself sometimes, for some purpose that is hard to state. It reminds me of something like, not falling limp as the labors of countless generations might finally come to fruition under your care. Which I’m excited for. The poem is about Greek independence, which Byron helped pursue in spite of his Englishness. He died in the process, so he would appear to be not fucking around when he says things like,

Place me on Sunium’s marbled steep,
 Where nothing, save the waves and I,
May hear our mutual murmurs sweep;
 There, swan-like, let me sing and die:
A land of slaves shall ne'er be mine—
Dash down yon cup of Samian wine!

(Wikipedia claims that his poetry and death were helpful in Greek victory, via rousing public opinion and so bringing the Western powers to intervene directly. If so, I wonder if that was an instance of changing the world a lot by describing it, i.e. making a narrative.) (Other random connection I didn’t know: Ada Lovelace of programming fame was Byron’s daughter.)

Lepanto by G. K. Chesterton is another poem I like that S introduced to me ages ago. I brought it up because it mentions Cervantes, author of Don Quixote, though it actually isn’t clear from it whether he was a prisoner on a ship, as I was claiming. (It seems Lord Byron died preparing an attack on the same city of Lepanto more than 200 years later, coincidentally it seems.)

I claimed that poets such as Byron getting intentionally caught up in wars isn’t that rare, for instance wasn’t Federico Lorca killed in the Spanish Civil War? And I thought a bunch of poets joined that…but hard to say because my knowledge of this is largely based on the lyrics of Spanish Bombs by early punk rock band The Clash: 

“…Federico Lorca is dead and gone, bullet holes in the cemetery walls…With trenches full of poets, The ragged army, fixin’ bayonets to fight the other line…”

Googling this very briefly now it seems Lorca was assassinated for ambiguous reasons at the start of the war, and I don’t know if he intended to be involved (perhaps because I only Googled it very briefly). The Spanish Civil War seemed to have a lot of poets in it for some reason though and is apparently sometimes called ‘the poets’ war’ but I’m not sure why (e.g. did they join it intentionally, or were just required to fight?). Wikipedia says many key ones were “volunteers in the International Brigades”, which sounds like they were from elsewhere and cared about the cause.

I know of Lorca because he inspired some of Leonard Cohen’s lyrics, for instance the great song ’Take this Waltz’ (Wikipedia says the song is actually just a loose translation into English of Lorca’s poem “Pequeño vals vienés”, or Little Viennese Waltz).

I thought I might have been overstating this connection, and that it was just one song with a few lyrics from Lorca. But on further investigation it seems Leonard Cohen loves Federico Lorca so much he named his daughter Lorca. Here he describes his position more:

‘Now, you know of my deep association and confraternity with the poet Federico Garcia Lorca. I could say that when I was a young man, an adolescent, and I hungered for a voice, I studied the English poets and I knew their work well, and I copied their styles, but I could not find a voice.

“It was only when I read, even in translation, the works of Lorca that I understood that there was a voice. It is not that I copied his voice; I would not dare. But he gave me permission to find a voice, to locate a voice, that is to locate a self, a self that is not fixed, a self that struggles for its own existence.

“As I grew older, I understood that instructions came with this voice. What were these instructions? The instructions were never to lament casually. And if one is to express the great inevitable defeat that awaits us all, it must be done within the strict confines of dignity and beauty.”

The article this quote is from also points out that Cohen draws inspiration from Lord Byron in particular. I don’t know why everything is connected. Maybe something to do with culture.