Incantations
Dec. 30th, 2023 06:29 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
The Bond of Bees,
by Keri Hulme.
I'm blending my mind
with the ease of wine
from candle flowers
on a warm afternoon
and a bloom of bees
from the kamahi
resounds resounds
in the quiet room
spikes to the honey
bees to the comb
the yeast to the sweet mead
and now the mead home
In poems that are repetitious, there's power in moments of surprise, of non-repetition. I like that this one doesn't go 'spikes to the honey, honey to the comb', which would also scan alright.
The length of the gap between 'resounds' and 'resounds' really jumped out at me when I'd made it too small. And then it was still one space too short, and I changed it just for form's sake, even though it was no longer a difference that struck me as making any difference.
Wild Iron,
by Allen Curnow
Sea go dark, dark with wind,
Feet go heavy, heavy with sand,
Thoughts go wild, wild with the sound
Of iron on the old shed swinging, clanging:
Go dark, go heavy, go wild, go round,
Dark with the wind,
Heavy with the sand,
Wild with the iron that tears at the nail
And the foundering shriek of the gale.
Again, I like the balance of repetition and difference in this. Four darks, four heavys, four wilds, one round. The iron that swings before it clangs. The colon is odd in a way that I like.
These are the two poems in the book I started memorising at once, barely on purpose: they caught in my mind and I wanted to read them over enough times that it made sense to spend a while hammering in the words which didn't want to stick. (I'm still forgetting 'kamahi', not a tree or word I know. 'Foundering shriek' took me a while too. I still don't quite know what sense of 'foundering' is being used here, and for a while I had it in my head as 'winnowing teeth.' And it was only checking the book again yesterday that I realised I'd had the first word as 'sky' when it's actually sea. I prefer sea. A dark wind in the sky had been seeming abstract.)
I looked for a poem I disliked to pair these two with, but the incantatory poems in the book that I dislike are either long, or they just don't register to me as interesting enough to talk about. They seem to stick too close to a format (so that the large repeating elements feel leaden or skippable) or else they don't have rhythms I like.
Do people feel it natural to emphasize the 'And' in the last line of wild iron? By instinct, I do, but that may be eroding, because it's so easy for me to imagine reading it da da DA da da DA da da DA.
Both these poems are still in the voice, not cleanly raising a memory or creating a scene for me. But I get a bit of that - the room in the bee poem has a color, or rather has a degree of sunlight on something pale or honey-colored, maybe a bit dusty; there's definitely a window, and ghosts of kitchens and living rooms I've known, mostly wooden. The album art to Tiny Ruins 'Olympic Girls' comes to mind because of the color.
My most striking beach memories are far-from-anywhere memories: a long way to the nearest shed. So Wild Iron feels a bit like folding space. The beach must be big, but the shed near, and I also want the shed to imply long, rough grass.