THE GREEN DOOR

1

THE GREEN DOOR

Issue Two THE GREEN DOOR is an international arts magazine which sees the artistic, the spiritual and the erotic (individually expressed but not collectively defined) as three expression of the one source. This is the only statement the editors have to make. Submissions are welcome in any discipline and should be sent to editorsgreendoor@gmail.com who will respond to those submissions they wish to accept. From time to time special issues will be devoted to the work of a single artist: this is at the discretion of the editors, though contributors may submit a large portfolio of work for consideration. http://greendoor.bloggen.be/ or http://bloggen.be./greendoor

2 ROGER GREEN Roger Green is an English poet living in Greece POEM AND LETTER TO MARCUS CUMBERLEGE 1: The Letter Dear Maria & Marcus This is not a proper letter – just a covering note for stuff about the quilting exhibition at the V & A, & for my Who Sweeps poem which I forgot to bring to Brugge (Mind the gap!)

Thank you both so much for yet another happy sojourn in Bruges/Brugge. and yes, it was happy for me at least, despite Marcus’s depression. I’m so glad you seem to be emerging from that now Marcus. I have to admit that I didn’t think that giving up your English teaching was a good idea. But that just shows a) how wrong you can be; b) how one should never try to improve or regulate anybody except oneself.

I’m typing this on an ancient imperial Safari which Ellie found for me. Faute de mieux (and not withstanding gaps), it’s OK. But with any luck we shall go to Cardiff on Friday and collect an Olivetti like the one I’ve used most of my life. Did I tell you that the person who has been repairing it was a man & is now a woman with a wig and an oestrogen patch?

Hope all goes smoothly from now on for the Selected Poems. Don’t forget to send an invitation for the launch. I imagine that your house will be full of visitors. I wonder whether I could prevail on Bruno to put me up again? It would be nice to bring Ellie too.

We’ll see.

Last Friday we attended a poetry reading near here (Brecon). There was an open mike session and I read my bougainvillea poem. Though I say it myself, it was very well received.

I wish we could come more often, but anyway the convention & the annual visits seem to come round with dizzying rapidity.

Thanking you both again.

Much love, Roger 2: The Poem: WHO SWEEPS The purple flowers keep falling night & day, Threatening to overwhelm my straitened entranceway.

I can hardly cope, even with the best of besoms, With the existentialist psychotherapist’s bougainvillea blossoms.

Without a by-your-leave or I-beg-your-pardon

3 I empty the coloured debris into Pigface’s overgrown garden.

I rest on my broom & admire a couple of passing bosoms, Then back to the existentialist psychotherapist’s bougainvillea blossoms.

I never dreamt that my charming, Heidegger-loving neighbour Would involve me in so much a Sisyphean labour.

But those of us who live in a house approached by narrow chasms Must tackle the existentialist psychotherapist’s bougainvillea blossoms.

I deal mercilessly with cats that stray into my yard, But sometimes trying to prevent them becomes very hard.

They make a picture straight out of a book of Old Possum’s As they frolic with the existentialist psychotherapist’s bougainvillea blossoms.

I continue my task. I’d rather be drinking coffee at the port.

But as I work, I console myself with the Herculean thought: Even the deepest Augean stables have to have bottoms, So must the existentialist psychotherapist’s bougainvillea blossoms.

I confess I don’t understand what constitutes the Existential, But I know that the man next door is full of good counsel Based on Merleau-Ponty, Sartre and other purveyors of isms – Me, I just clear up the existentialist psychotherapist’s bougainvillea blossoms.

I reflect as I wield my broom that it’s odd how things turn out; Although I don’t suffer much from mental anguish or self-doubt, I cannot deny that my mind harbours certain dark abysms Whose treatment lies in sweeping the existentialist psychotherapist’s bougainvillea blossoms.

Hydra 18 & 30/12/09 MARCUS CUMBERLEGE Is an English poet living in Brugge, Belgium where his Selected Poems have just been published –a short film of the launching of this work can be seen on www.marcuscumberlege.com. Issue One carried work by this poet and The Green Door will carry further examples of his work THE PRECIOUS TIME (looking on the bright side) All you have to do is feel good. Nothing else matters at the moment.

Any worries about the day ahead are only sick fantasy.

Cultivate the feeling that your head is a space of freedom and light.

4

You were not born to spend the precious time in idle speculation.

Do exactly what you feel like, for this day was meant to be enjoyed.

Passionately imagine you are fine. Now feel it and receive it.

Later in the day you will reap the benefits of this exercise.

Everything in the universe is conspiring to help you feel good.

Happiness is a marvellous blue bird that comes to sit on your branch.

The art of life consists of transforming unhappiness into joy.

One method at our disposal is Rimbaud's “Alchemy of the Word”.

Remember you are the author of Marcus Cumberlege's poems.

You possess a large number of incomparable personal gifts.

When enjoyment brightens the horizon, go for it with all you've got.

Become aware of your body and make it a partner of your dreams.

Time is on your side – and so are the protective and healing angels.

I am young at heart, I am in good health, I am strong, I am sober.

The universe wants me to achieve my lifelong ambitions and goals.

Watch the blue tits darting hither and thither in the autumn garden.

Look at the yellow leaves on that tree-of heaven dancing in the wind.

You are one of God's favourite children, you have a right to be here.

It always comes back to this – stop calculating and get on with life.

Feeling good continues to be the standard by which all is measured.

CATCHING FIRE (a mood-swing upwards) So much for my woozy head. It means I must have had a good night's sleep.

Stop worrying, and think of something for which you are truly grateful.

I am grateful for my hands. How beautiful they look in the lamplight.

5

Remember the good vibes you got from wrapping up Selected Poems.

Putting little things off creates big worry. Get them out of the way.

Look forward with love. It is in your power to make great things happen.

Inner satisfaction, inner light, inner peace – gifts of solitude.

Do not underestimate the pleasure of bending over the sink.

It feels good to sit here at my desk surrounded by my favourite things.

Get up and walk around. It will help to dislodge obstinate worries.

I pray that my Selected Poems will bring happiness to many.

In Mietje's sparkling world of truth I shall sometimes be a visitor.

Do I believe all sentient beings in my universe are saved?

Some days I have more energy than others and some days I have less.

The children are enjoying themselves in the school yard and so am I. I hope that when reading these journals later my spirit will catch fire.

Wedding anniversary. Feeling “well” after three weeks' depression.

Can I keep this “wellness” under control, and not fly off the handle?

“Not getting euphoric” involves breathing peacefully and standing still.

As soon as I began to get “better” I felt the need to give love.

Predictably, I light a candle for someone who has “stopped coming”.

Hypersensitive? I take two valerian capsules just in case.

My loving attitude to everyone will mark this evening's meeting.

Easy Does It. There is nothing to get het up or alarmed about.

DAVID R MORGAN Author David R Morgan teaches 11-20 year olds at Cardinal Newman School in Luton, and lives in Bedfordshire with his ex wife and two children. His eldest daughter lives in The Isle Of Man.

6 David has been an arts worker and literature officer, organizer of book festivals and writerin-residence for education authorities, Littlehay Prison and Fairfield Psychiatric Hospital (which was the subject of a Channel 4 film, Out of Our Minds).He has had two plays screened on ITV. His books for children include : The strange Case of William Whipper-Snapper, three Info Rider books for Collins and Blooming Cats which won the Acorn Award and was recently animated for BBC2's Words and Pictures Plus as well as a Horrible Histories biography: Spilling The Beans On Boudicca. David has also written poetry books, including: The Broken Picture Book, The Windmill and the Grains (Hawthorn Prize) and Buzz Off. His poetry collection Walrus On A Rocking Chair , illustrated by John Welding, is published

by Claire Publications and his adult poetry Ticket For The Peepshow is published by art’icle.

He won the National Forward Poetry competition last year with his poem WHY POPPIES ?

WHAT THE FAIRY BRINGS TO THE TABLE He brings his balls.

He is not Abelard.

He brings his ears on a plate.

He is not Van Gogh.

He brings his eyes.

He's not Oedipus in disguise.

He presents his entire head.

He is not King Charles.

He is the final fairy from the final tale and you are privileged … by his persistence.

FAIRY’S BLOOD The keepers take the hawks to the van, and urge them in, the dispirited hawks.

The fairy has escaped again, flicked her heart, has eluded them -in the gelatinous dark fluttering, panting

7 her eyes black as mouse eyes immediately after the trap has sprung stunning, bulging them.

The hunt rides on.

RED RIDINGHOOD AT FIFTY Forty years later, you come again along that path in the woods to my grandmother's home, planning to try us once more, and knowing the woodcutter is gone because the trees are gone.

But we have seen worse wolves at the door since your occasion: impending foreclosure, bad mortgage, Angina, chronic back pain, rotten molars, my son caught with a shaggy hand in the till.

Your grey look is memorable to me.

Calling to Grandmother in the kitchen, I laugh in your face. You just stand there, not knowing whether to smile or what to say. But yes, old friend: I always knew who it was in that dress.

Come on in and have a drink.

A WORD WELL CHOSEN Nests are arrayed and shingled in the air beneath the wandering sponsorship of a word well chosen. When mating calls are heard ancient atoms move in the desiring pair.

A pinpoint in the unending eons tells of the cyclical universe’s baptistery; the unicorn prances, eyes arched in mystery, and zebras pass by musing on parallels.

8 Within the fact and fiction of life’s defining mind timeless griffins have vague wings outspread and even the outnumbering, never ending dead are sung and not quite to quietness resigned ... yet they have gone like music from science’s keeping towards the total truth; forgetfulness in sleeping.

THE GIFT In this place light disappears, then reappears.

In this place divinity dwells with open eyes; seeing the big picture, focussing on detail.

In this place children stare out of windows; do they see leaves ascending to the clouds, or that last candle lighting the darkness?

In this place there are lights in a leaf that flicker and go out, as the leaf dies.

In this place where light disappears and where light re-appears, new leaves unfurl; children stare so long out of windows, imagining they can fly free, far above the clouds.

Divinity dwells with open eyes of eternal darkness and infinite light. Eventually we all float away into empty mirrors, just out of view, disappearing into a silhouette of distilled darkness in which something else appears; something familiar grasping for anything that resembles the light of home.

Divinity dwells in life’s details, the gift in all of us , darkness and light; so if there come leaves out of clouds or catastrophes, or lovers into rooms issuing leavings; we should learn compassionately how to cup our hands, as if in a world of swirling wind, where children fly, there is one candle left that must be saved.

In this place life refuses to be diminished by our limits but, like a lover, takes whatever is given and, in the tiniest detail, gives back more, and all that can ever be known is that where light disappears and reappears is divinity’s dwelling and the place where we live.

SAYS THE GREEN MAN ‘I burn with desire,’ says the Green Man.

9

On weekends I help my Dad look for his soul. He says he needs it now because he is about to become an angel. He can feel his wings almost beginning to unfurl behind his back. He says he used to be a wizard of words, or a giant poet (the story varies from telling to telling), and, as was the custom for his kind, he put his soul into an egg (or perhaps a stone) for safekeeping. He hid the egg (or stone) inside a duck (or in the belly of a sheep, or in a tree stump), and so long as his soul was safe, his body could not be killed or wounded.

"Oh," he says. "I was the greatest terror of the hills. My words ate the hearts of knights," or sometimes, "I lived in my high tower and none dared oppose me, and with the reciting of my poetry I could turn stone to mud and water to boiling blood." Or sometimes "The earth trembled with my every image." He said this almost wistfully. “But now I must become an angel or else the earth will tremble and tremble and tear itself apart.”

My Dad is seventy eight (unless he is hundreds of years old as he claims). His bearded face is covered in dark freckles, liver spots, and moles, and he says that each blemish marks a year he's lived beyond his rightful span. All he wants is to find the egg (or stone) that houses his soul, so that he may break the egg (or crush the stone) and die.

‘I burn with desire,’ says the Green Man. I asked Dad once, while we looked for his soul in the waste bins at the park, "How could you misplace your soul?"

"I hid it so well, I forgot where it was hidden," he said.

"Seems like a hell of a thing to forget, Dad." I said.

"When you don't have a soul," he said, "It's harder to know which things are important to remember."

We go out every weekend. He's old. I am his only son, although his dementia means that he doesn’t remember who I am. Mum sheds a tear for the husband she has lost to legend and dementia. Dad and I are companions for one another. He tells marvellous stories. Although he never did, it is as if he once taught mythology, though he tells the tales of gods and heroes as if he saw it all firsthand.

Once he found a robin's egg on the ground. It must have fallen from a nest. He held the egg in trembling hands, cracked it, and yolk spilled out. No soul. He shook the egg off his hands.

Bits of shell fell to the ground. He wiped his hands on his trousers and went on looking, picking up rocks, dropping them in disgust and frustration. At times the light flickered and made it look like he was about to take flight.

‘I burn with desire,’ says the Green Man, We go out every weekend; looking for his soul, so that he can become an angel, so that he can save things. We walk the length of the town and back, but somehow the earth never trembles…only me.

‘I burn with desire,’ says the Green Man, ‘I burn with desire,’ says he.

10 PATRIZIA MOROTTI Was born in Terracina (Italy). She undertook her medical studies in and moved further to Belgium where she now lives with her husband, a university professor, and her son Laurens, a young architect.

Graduated from the university of Florence in medicine, she now works as a paediatrician in the city of Bruges. She enjoys writing poetry and has been a finalist to the Poetry Contest “Il Fauno”, Firenze.

LA PASSEGGIATA in OOSTENDE It concerns a promenade in Oostende; A scene of a day full of sun, sea and playing children leading to an interior sensation of happiness.

Passeggiata rinfrescante tra le righe bianche e rosse delle sedie a sdraio in fila sulla terrazza del lungomare di Oostende.

Il sole mi scalda da dentro a fuori.

Un chiaccherio, quasi un sussurro di gratitudine, si sparge sui volti di bambini ed adulti che giocano col pallone e col sole, mentre gli sguardi si riparano sotto il cappello.

In una giornata cosi, ti senti strana: Il sole fa specchiare la natura E di rimbalzo la tua mente si riempie: placata la sete di benessere, comincia a danzare con l'insignificante usuale che, almeno per un momentino, sembra ricco di avvenimenti felici e importanti.

AMMIRANDO MARCEL BROODTHAERS …. e L'AMICIZIA It is a praise to the artist Marcel Broodthaers following a visit to an exhibition in Bruges dedicated to him. I was very impressed and felt in full agreement with his works. This poem tries to express my feelings following a format inspired to the Works of MB. Dolcemente mi scaldo nelle pagine dei tuoi dipinti negli odori dei tuoi pensieri nei rimpianti da tempo ingoiati Il vento fugge lontano e mi porta inconsapevolmente su sentieri abbandonati mi sciolgo al tepore dei tuoi sussurri

11

Inconsapevolmente appiccicati sulla mia pelle come una succulenta melagranata accartoccio i chicchi di emozioni regali in fantasie di fuoco Serenamente mi scaldo nei tuoi dipinti e nei tuoi pensieri Sorrisi e rimpianti da tempo fuggono lontano Inconsapevolmente il vento mi porta là dove mi sciolgo tra i sentieri al tepore della mia pelle inconfondibilmente appiccicata ai tuoi sussurri Come un amore accartocciato scortico chicchi da una succulenta melagranata e regalo un poco di fantasia alla mia serenità Dolcemente scaldo sorrisi ingoiati dal vento che si appiccica regale su fantasie di fuoco Serenamente il vento ingoia il mio fuoco di fantasie e lentamente si appiccica regale Veramente la mia gioia si fa dolce e comincia a regalare parole nuove spezzate in lettere dall’emozione intangibile effimera muta: F-R-A-T-E-R R-O-M-A ----A-M-O-R

NUDITA Its a poem about a poet without inspiration. He asks for help to the Muse of poetry.

Snip-Snap Scarabocchio La penna mi corre verticale nel foglio giù fino al profondo dell' anima E' li piange, geme e si accartoccia

12 cerca disperatamente un angolo puro dove sentirsi di nuovo viva.

E' buio totale ora.

Snip- Snap E' nuda la mia poesia I suoi occhi sono turgidi di desiderio e la sua anima é pronta, ma c'é tristezza, confusione la mente l'ha abbandonata per stanchezza Nessun mantello di idee a coprirla.

Cosi, essa rimane in quel grugnolo buio, abbarbicata tra i suoi pensieri arrotolati in una matassa di nodi tutti da sciogliere, e piange la sua nudità.

Snip –snap linea orizzontale linea verticale Scarabocchio Laddove le parole non si scrivono Vieni con me, idea silenziosa accarezza la mia mente con le tue dita umide e trepide, avvicina la mia anima e baciala piano sussuragli con tenerezza comprensione laddove le parole non riescono Poi, fammi bere le delizie della bontà umana fammi odorare ancora una volta il profumo dell'idea che nasce si riconosce libera, sboccia, dona caldi baci e folleggia come con un innamorato ardito.

Cosi, in tutta la sua presunzione Si espone ….

ROSA CONCHIGLIA It is a light, shining and penetrating poem that brings breath, colour and serenity, but also offers a metaphysical and symbolic message of a dream.

13 Rosa conchiglia Di pesca il profumo Di mare la meraviglia.

Affanni innaffiati Progetti rubati Sereni incontri.

Col fiato sospeso Mi appiccico al vetro Ci soffio convinta.

Quante speranze Suona la fantasia Alla ricerca del buono.

In un angolo nascosto Sul becco di un uccello tenero Sulla lacrima di un puro.

Seguo il mio cuore E il mio animo vigile Nel paese sognato.

E aspetto tranquilla: Rosa conchiglia Amore e meraviglia.

BALLANDO E DANZANDO It is a moving poem about life, dance, love that requires but simultaneously explains inner peace.

Ballando e danzando Dal buio scollando Una perla di luce Mi illumina il volto Mi illumina la mente.

Per un attimo non cammino, Un volto perso nello specchio Nell'immobilità mi sento altro Una goccia di orgoglio mi rallegra la via Il coraggio risveglia la mia mente Ballando e danzando tra i pensieri‌ Amare e credere: anche accontentarsi di vivere sapendo bene che non si sa dove arriveremo.

14

La casa della chiocciola indica il tempo.

Le cicale suonano le giornate calde.

I grilli cantano le notti profetiche.

Messaggi scanditi dall'immensità camminano a fatica da soli Si trasportano su carri cigolanti spinti da unicorni volteggianti in una concreta leggerezza L'orgoglio a volte li fa fermare, Ma non perdere Ed è subito pace.

PENSIERI A poem about the lightness of life, about the way we elaborate thoughts and the way we often forget them.

Volano bizzarri i miei pensieri, via…

Scorrono Come foglie rincorse dal vento Scricchiolano e si rotolano In frettolose cialde color miele, accartocciate.

Corrono via, qui e là, i miei pensieri Confusamente Rispondono forse e soltanto Al volare e al volere del vento Un vento gentile o predone, chissà.

Cosi’ volano i miei pensieri Accartocciati Come cialde color miele.

Volano confusi tra le foglie, Corrono e scorrono nel tempo che vola, via…

PAUL LAUGHLIN Paul Laughlin lives in Derry, Ireland. His poetry has appeared in Aimsir Og, Cyphers, Electric Acorn, Fortnight, the Irish Reporter and the Stony Thursday Book. A first collection 'Narratives and the Interpreted World' was published earlier this year by Lapwing Press.

Narratives, a sequence of nine poems has been described by Seamus Deane as 'very impressive'

15 ASTRONOMY LESSON Challenging and Confounding His tutors again Young Galileo Is warned To take care "The world Does not revolve Around you son" STARS Gently, under a glittering Blue-bronze night sky You turn to ask me What if love like the stars Is not fixed and in the end Like the stars it must die And though astronomy Escapes me I can Feel the world spin.

WORDS If I could find words Evoking a love That might reach Down the years Or win scholarly praise I would share them First with you And dwell awhile In your heart

RESPITE Leaving the jungle early A weary TS Eliot observes Humankind cannot bear Very much reality

16 ALBY STONE Alby Stone was born in 1954 near Southend-on-Sea, Essex. He obtained a B.Ed. (Hons) in 1986 at Thames Polytechnic, specialising in historical and sociological studies, and language acquisition. Since 1982 he has lived in London, where he works as a civil servant. His main interests are the history, archaeology and sociology of religion and associated beliefs and practices, historical linguistics; and the quirks, conceits and follies of the human mind.

Alby Stone would like to make it clear that he does not support any organisation, philosophy or creed that discriminates against or devalues any person or group of people because of differences of age, physical or mental ability, ethnicity, skin colour, religion, sex, sexual orientation or political belief, or which seeks to promote hatred, repression and division based on such differences.

THE PERILOUS BRIDGE Earth has not anything to show more fair: Dull would be he of soul who could pass by A sight so touching in its majesty: This city now doth, like a garment, wear The beauty of the morning; silent bare, Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie Open unto the fields, and to the sky; All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

So wrote William Wordsworth in his famous poem Upon Westminster Bridge. This crystallises a timeless moment in which the mundane is transmuted into the magical: the city evoked by the poet’s words is a far cry from the grubby, noisy, tumultuous place that London has ever been, transformed by the hour and Wordsworth’s vision into a still, mystical realm in harmony with nature, at peace with itself. Bridges have this effect on the perceptive soul. It does not really matter whether Wordsworth penned his lines while actually standing upon the bridge, or was simply inspired to write them while walking across it - or, for that matter, if he just imagined that he was there while he was composing the poem. The important thing here is the symbolism: the bridge, and the enchanted world it brings to the poet’s mind. The very nature of a bridge dictates its symbolic use. It is a structure that joins two otherwise separate pieces of land, yet at the same time enhances their separateness. One can travel across it, from one land mass to another, but while on it the traveller is neither in one place nor the other. A bridge is a quintessentially liminal thing, and it shares those qualities that characterise other things that delimit one state from another - doors, boundaries, the turning point of one day or year to the next - by being dangerous, enchanted, pregnant with a double-edged potential. In his poem The Bridge, H.W. Longfellow marries the liminal object with a kindred point in time: I stood upon the bridge at midnight, As the clocks were striking the hour.

This place between places is also a place between times [1]. Otherwise responsible adults have been known to revert to a childhood state while on a bridge, feeling free to play the

17 game of Pooh Sticks made popular by the children’s books of A.A. Milne. Normally sane and sober men and women will happily indulge in infantile games when they encounter a bridge.

Obviously it was Milne who prepared the way; but it is the bridge that is the trigger, and there everyday social rôles and behaviour are suspended.

In cosmological myth, bridges sometimes lead from the realm of mortals to the land of the dead, or to the abode of the gods. Zoroastrian myth tells of the Cinvat (‘separation’) bridge, ‘the holy bridge made by Mazda’ that stretches over hell to paradise, ‘which is the route of every one, righteous or wicked; the width across the route of the righteous is a breadth of nine spears, each one the length of three reeds, but the route for the wicked becomes like the edge of a razor’ [2]. The bridge is suspended between two mountains, one in the centre of the world, one at the rim. This serves to reinforce the liminal bridge’s status, by linking the range of mountains believed to encircle the earth, that which separates the outside from the inside, with that of the axis mundi, which keeps earth and sky apart. Similar bridges occur in the traditions of the Ossetes, Armenians, and Georgians; and the bridge al-Sirat (‘the path’) of Islamic tradition is almost certainly derived from Zoroastrian cosmology.

The Cinvat bridge is analogous to that crossed by the Altaic shaman in the spirit-journey to the underworld realm of Erlik Khan. This bridge is as wide as a hair, and the sea below it is strewn with the bones of shamans who have failed the crossing - like the Cinvat, this bridge will not tolerate a sinner [3]. A variation on this motif occurs in North American native myth: the Telumni Yokuts believe that the land of the dead is reached by crossing a stream by way of a shaking bridge that the living cannot use [4]. In the same vein are the sword-bridge that features in a number of Arthurian romances, and the pont où nul ne passe described in a continuation of Chrétien de Troyes’ Perceval. The last is only half a bridge, but when the hero reaches the middle it swings about so that the end that formerly rested on one side now leads to the other [5]. The Arthurian bridges do not lead to the underworld, strictly speaking, but to an otherworld of sorts - deeper into the enchanted land of adventure. The road to the land of the dead is said to lead across a bridge in many other traditions. The Semang of Malaysia have a bridge called Balan Bacham that reaches across the sea to the magical island of Belet; also in Malaysia, the Sakai tell of a bridge named Menteg that spans a cauldron of boiling water, into which the wicked fall [6]. For the Moso of southwest China, the otherworld is reached by a bridge blockaded by demons [7].

The Norse myth of Baldr’s death tells of Hermóðr’s ride to the land of Hel on Odin’s steed Sleipnir; on the way he crosses the Gjallar brú, the gold-roofed ‘echoing bridge’ over the river Gjoll. Saxo Grammaticus gives the story of Hadingus, who is taken on a journey to the underworld by a mysterious woman; on the road they cross a bridge over a river strewn with weapons [8]. Saxo also tells of a river that separates the world of men from a supernatural realm inhabited by monsters, spanned by a golden bridge forbidden to travellers [9]; and the paradisal land Odainsakr of Eiríks Saga Viðforla is reached via a stone bridge [10]. The most famous bridge in Norse myth is Bifrost, the ‘trembling way’ that is popularly identified with the rainbow. Bifrost stretches from Miðgarðr to Asgarðr, terminating at Himinbjorg, the home of its watchman Heimdallr [11].

Bridges, like all crossing places, are dangerous. As routes across the body of water that separates the living from the dead, or across the infernal abyss, these mythical bridges are especially dangerous: the soul of the sinner cannot cross, and the bridge distinguishes between the righteous and the damned. Earthly bridges are fixed structures, but these are narrow or broad, as occasion demands, or are endowed with an apparent structural

18 unsoundness that allows only the morally resolute to make the crossing in safety.

Sometimes, the danger is there for all, and for the righteous the bridge is a final test.

Invariably, the bridge leads to a kind of paradise or to an underworld that will not tolerate the presence of the bad, who fall from it into a place of dissolution or punishment.

The association of bridges with death and testing persists into the present day. It is a symbolic state that has been used to good effect in the cinema. Francis Ford Coppola’s Apocalypse Now (1979), while largely based on Joseph Conrad’s novel Heart of Darkness, often departs into mythological territory. One spectacular scene is set at a bridge where the Viet Cong are locked in a stalemate with US troops. The structure is rebuilt every day, and destroyed at night; its American defenders move and act as if they are already dead. The whole scene is spectral and eerie, imbued with a depressing sense of futility and fatalism that neatly encapsulates the war in Vietnam, and also suggests the timelessness that is a property of all liminal places. The undoing of the day’s labour at night-time is a common motif in folklore; and appropriately enough, the notion of repetitive, futile labour is often represented metaphorically as ‘painting the Forth Bridge’ - the worker completes a particularly laborious and time-consuming task, then has to do it all over again from the very beginning. Unlike the bridge of Apocalypse Now, in which the enemy forces are as invisible as ghosts, that of A Bridge Too Far (directed by Richard Attenborough, 1977), based on the book by Cornelius Ryan, which tells the story of the Allied defeat at Arnhem in 1944, is a straightforward symbol of the common ground that both links and divides the combatants. In the film of Thornton Wilder’s novel The Bridge At San Luis Rey (Rowland V. Lee, 1944), the tenuous links between five very different people are symbolised by the Peruvian rope-bridge that collapses beneath them. A German film, The Bridge (Bernhard Wicki, 1959), uses the bridge as a metaphor for the transition from childhood to adulthood, when only a group of 16-yearold boys are left to defend a town from the Allied forces in 1945.

More complex is David Lean’s famous 1957 adaptation of Pierre Boulle’s novel The Bridge on the River Kwai, in which British prisoners of war are set to work building a bridge for the Japanese invaders. The magnificent performance of Alec Guinness, as the Colonel who is at first resistant to the Japanese demands, and then tries to prevent the bridge’s destruction, tends to distract the viewer from the symbolic purpose of the bridge itself: it is, once again, a structure that both unites and divides the two warring sides; but it is also the Colonel’s own personal metaphor, a way of reconciling captivity with freedom of spirit, duty with loss of purpose. It is also the object whose construction leads, inexorably and tragically, to his death.

These cinematic examples - there are many more, often adaptations from modern literature serve to illustrate the abiding symbolism of the bridge, and demonstrate that its archaic cosmological import is embedded in our collective consciousness. It is ironic that a structure whose mundane purpose is to facilitate safe crossing has become a place of danger, linked inextricably with the workings of death [12]. Indeed, bridges are perennially notorious for the attraction they exert upon potential suicides. The Golden Gate Bridge of San Francisco is a prime example, a genuine suicidal ‘black spot’. The Bridge of Sighs is famous as the bridge in Venice over which prisoners were taken to be executed; but it is also an old nickname for London’s Waterloo Bridge, which used to be a popular venue for suicides, and was the inspiration for Thomas Hood’s poem The Bridge of Sighs: One more Unfortunate, Weary of breath,

19 Rashly importunate, Gone to her death.

But if bridges represent the journey of the dead to the otherworld, they are also associated with the return of the dead to the land of the living. A German tradition tells that when crops are plentiful, Charlemagne crosses the Rhine over a golden bridge at Bingen to give his blessing to the fields and vineyards. Bridges are often believed to be haunted, like the crossroads to which, as symbols, they are closely related.

The exploitation of bridge imagery is not confined to myth, cinema, and literature. Bridges are obvious targets in wartime. Yet while they usually have an undoubted strategic value, the energy and firepower expended upon bridges is often out of all proportion to any military interest the structure might arouse. Probably the best example is the lengthy onslaught suffered by the historic bridge at Mostar in Bosnia, not very long ago. It is generally acknowledged that the Serbs’ interest in the Mostar bridge was dictated by its symbolic nature, linking as it did the Serb-held part of the town with the predominantly Moslem area; its destruction was a symbol of ethnic differences that the Serbian militia would no longer tolerate. Proverbially, bridge-builders are diplomats and peace-makers, those who seek to heal rifts and establish common ground. Given the ongoing failure of diplomacy in the war-torn states that were once a united Yugoslavia, the destruction of the Mostar bridge is all the more poignant, and doubly disturbing. In ancient Rome, Horatius Cocles was traditionally credited with saving the city from the Etruscans commanded by Lars Porsenna, who were attacking the wooden bridge across the Tiber, the Pons Sublicius. Horatius, so the story goes, fought off the invaders with the help of two noblemen who had been shamed into assisting him, while others destroyed the bridge behind them. The usual story has it that Horatius, having sent his two comrades back, swam across the Tiber when the bridge fell; but in another version, the hero dies [13]. This hero-tale may have grown up to explain the ritual casting of straw effigies called Argei into the river from the same bridge every May, and an old statue - supposedly of Horatius - that stood there [14]. The rationale may lie in the Roman idea of Rome itself: as an ideal state and also a representation of the cosmos, Rome is a notional paradise, its citizenship not given lightly. Perhaps here we see the Roman penchant for historicising older mythology in terms of the actual city: the Argei would thus be symbolic of those who do not belong there, and are cast into the waters in the same way as those unworthy souls who fall from the bridge to paradise in the mythologies mentioned above. Horatius then occupies the same mythological niche as Heimdallr, or the various other watchmen, porters, and guardian creatures that bar the bridge.

It is as a link between this world and the next that the image of the bridge is at its most potent.

The Cinvat bridge recurs, as an object of veneration and as a cipher for admission to paradise, throughout Iranian religious literature. The Pope is known as the ‘sovereign pontiff’, a title derived from that of the chief priest of pagan Rome, the Pontifex Maximus - literally, the ‘greatest bridge-builder’, the link between the divine and the mundane. Papal commands which are effectively Church dogma - help determine who gets into the Catholic heaven and who does not; the bridge-builder is thus also its guardian, and it is he who sets the crucial tests that sort the worthy from the unworthy. The bridge between worlds is ever perilous.

References: 1: On the timelessness of liminal places and states, see Victor Turner, Dramas, Fields, and Metaphors: Symbolic Action in Human Society (Ithaca and London, 1974), p238-9.

20 2: E.W. West (trans.), Pahlavi Texts Part IV: Contents of the Nasks (Oxford 1892; reprinted Delhi 1965), p210.

3: Mircea Eliade, Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy (Princeton, 1964), p202.

4: Ibid., p311.

5: Chrétien de Troyes (trans, Nigel Bryant), Perceval: The Story of the Grail (Cambridge, 1982), p169. Earlier in the same text, the hero crosses an ivory bridge that gives him a scare: ‘behind him the bridge, so perilous and fearsome to cross, was crumbling all away: Perceval thought it would collapse into the abyss, for it was shaking so mightily and furiously’ (p163). Perceval puts his faith in the mule he is riding, and she bears him across with ‘neither ill nor pain.’

6: Eliade, op. cit., p281-2.

7: Ibid., p 446-7.

8: H.R. Ellis Davidson, The Road to Hel: A Study of the Conception of the Dead in Old Norse Literature (Cambridge, 1943), p171-3.

9: Ibid., p186.

10: Ibid., p190.

11: The name also occurs as Bilrost, which some have considered the earlier form. As it is, this would mean something like ‘temporary way’; in a wider cosmological context, ‘trembling way’ would be more apposite. See Rudolf Simek, Dictionary of Northern Mythology (Cambridge, 1993), p36-7 for entries under both forms of the name.

12: Mary Douglas, Purity and Danger: An Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo London, 1966): ‘Danger lies in transitional states, simply because transition is neither one state nor the next, it is undefinable. The person who must pass from one to another is himself in danger and emanates danger to others’ (p96). This idea has been called into question - see for example, Rodney Needham, Symbolic Classification (Santa Monica, 1979), p46; Bruce Lincoln, Discourse and the Construction of Society: Comparative Studies of Myth, Ritual, and Classification (Oxford, 1989), p164-6, both of whom suggest that there is no inherent danger, but that, as Lincoln concludes, ‘In: the right hands, however, and under the right circumstances, such anomalous entities can become potent weapons’ (p170). It must be stressed that Lincoln is primarily concerned with anamalous individuals and things, as distinct from the transitional states discussed here - and in these states, danger is a constant factor.

Individuals in liminal states are always at some risk, especially if entry into the next state has moral strings attached.

13: Jane F. Gardner, Roman Myths (London, 1993), p45-6.

14: Argei were kept at twenty-seven sacra Argeorum, minor shrines located around Rome; the effigies resembled men bound hand and foot (R.M. Ogilvie, The Romans and Their Gods, London, 1969, p87). Ogilvie opines that this ceremony was a substitute for an earlier rite in which old men were sacrificed in the same manner, and states that a similar sacrifice was recorded as having been performed in 440 BC, citing a later proverb, ‘off the bridge with the sixty-year-olds’ (p88). This does not rule out the possibility that those old men were symbolic sinners or scapegoats, their drowning ensuring the continued identity of Rome as the ideal city-state - an earthly paradise.

Originally published in At the Edge No.1 1996.

21 A. S. KLINE Tony Kline lives in England. He graduated in Mathematics from the University of Manchester, and was Chief Information Officer (Systems Director) of a large UK Company, before dedicating himself to his literary work and interests. He was born in 1947. His work consists of translations of poetry; critical works, biographical history with poetry as a central theme; and his own original poetry. He has translated into English from Latin, Ancient Greek, Classical Chinese and the European languages. He also maintains a deep interest in developments in Mathematics and the Sciences.

More work will appear in further issues of The Green Door WORDS FROM COLD MOUNTAIN Introduction Han-shan, the Master of Cold Mountain, and his friend Shi-te, lived in the late-eighth to early-ninth century AD, in the sacred T’ien-t’ai Mountains of Chekiang Province, south of the bay of Hangchow. The two laughing friends, holding hands, come and go, but mostly go, dashing into the wild, careless of others’ reality, secure in their own. As Han-shan himself says, his Zen is not in the poems. Zen is in the mind.

1.

Don’t you know the poems of Han-shan?

They’re better for you than scripture-reading.

Cut them out and paste them on a screen, Then you can gaze at them from time to time.

2.

Where’s the trail to Cold Mountain?

Cold Mountain? There’s no clear way.

Ice, in summer, is still frozen.

Bright sun shines through thick fog.

You won’t get there following me.

Your heart and mine are not the same.

If your heart was like mine, You’d have made it, and be there!

3.

Cold Mountain’s full of strange sights.

Men who go there end by being scared.

Water glints and gleams in the moon, Grasses sigh and sing in the wind.

The bare plum blooms again with snow, Naked branches have clouds for leaves.

When it rains, the mountain shines – In bad weather you’ll not make this climb.

22

4.

A thousand clouds, ten thousand streams, Here I live, an idle man, Roaming green peaks by day, Back to sleep by cliffs at night.

One by one, springs and autumns go, Free of heat and dust, my mind.

Sweet to know there’s nothing I need, Silent as the autumn river’s flood.

5.

High, high, the summit peak, Boundless the world to sight!

No one knows I am here, Lone moon in the freezing stream.

In the stream, where’s the moon?

The moon’s always in the sky.

I write this poem: and yet, In this poem there is no Zen. 6 Thirty years in this world I wandered ten thousand miles, By rivers, buried deep in grass, In borderlands, where red dust flies.

Tasted drugs, still not Immortal, Read books, wrote histories.

Now I’m back at Cold Mountain, Head in the stream, cleanse my ears.

7.

Bird-song drowns me in feeling.

Back to my shack of straw to sleep Cherry-branches burn with crimson flower, Willow-boughs delicately trail.

Morning sun flares between blue peaks, Bright clouds soak in green ponds.

Who guessed I’d leave that dusty world, Climbing the south slope of Cold Mountain?

8.

23

I travelled to Cold Mountain: Stayed here for thirty years.

Yesterday looked for family and friends.

More than half had gone to Yellow Springs.

Slow-burning, life dies like a flame, Never resting, passes like a river.

Today I face my lone shadow.

Suddenly, the tears flow down.

9.

Alive in the mountains, not at rest, My mind cries for passing years.

Gathering herbs to find long life, Still I’ve not achieved Immortal.

My field’s deep, and veiled in cloud, But the wood’s bright, the moon’s full.

Why am I here? Can’t I go?

Heart still tied to enchanted pines!

10.

If there’s something good, delight!

Seize the moment while it flies!

Though life can last a hundred years, Who’s seen their thirty thousand days?

Just an instant then you’re gone.

Why sit whining over things?

When you’ve read the Classics through, You’ll know quite enough of death.

11.

The peach petals would like to stay, But moon and wind blow them on.

You won’t find those ancient men, Those dynasties are dead and gone.

Day by day the blossoms fall, Year by year the people go.

Where the dust blows through these heights, There once shone a silent sea.

12.

Men who see the Master Of Cold Mountain, say he’s mad.

24 A nothing face, Body clothed in rags.

Who dare say what he says?

When he speaks we can’t understand.

Just one word to you who pass – Take the trail to Cold Mountain!

13.

Han-shan has his critics too: ‘Your poems, there’s nothing in them!’

I think of men of ancient times, Poor, humble, but not ashamed.

Let him laugh at me and say: ‘It’s all foolishness, your work!’

Let him go on as he is, All his life lost making money.

14.

Cold Mountain holds a naked bug, Its body’s white, its head is black.

In its hands a pair of scrolls, One the Way and one its Power.

It needs no pots or stove.

Without clothes it wanders on, But it carries Wisdom’s blade, To cut down mindless craving.

15.

I’m on the trail to Cold Mountain.

Cold Mountain trail never ends.

Long clefts thick with rock and stones, Wide streams buried in dense grass.

Slippery moss, but there’s been no rain, Pine trees sigh, but there’s no wind.

Who can leap the world’s net, Sit here in the white clouds with me?

16.

Men ask the way through the clouds, The cloud way’s dark, without a sign.

High summits are of naked rock.

In deep valleys sun never shines.

Behind you green peaks, and in front, To east the white clouds, and to west –

25 Want to know where the cloud way lies?

It’s there, in the centre of the Void!

17.

Sitting alone by folded rocks, Mist swirling even at noon, Here, inside my room, it’s dark.

Mind is bright, clear of sound.

Through the shining gate in dream.

Back by the stone bridge, mind returns.

Where now the things that troubled me?

Wind-blown gourd rattling in the tree.

18.

Far-off is the place I chose to live.

High hills make for silent tongues.

Gibbons screech in valley cold My gate of grass blends with the cliff.

A roof of thatch among the pines, I dig a pool, feed it from the stream.

No time now to think about the world, The years go by, shredding ferns.

19.

Level after level, falls and hills, Blue-green mist clasped by clouds.

Fog wets my flimsy cap, Dew soaks my coat of straw.

A pilgrim’s sandals on my feet, An old stick grasped in my hand.

Gazing down towards the land of dust, What is that world of dreams to me?

20.

What a road the Cold Mountain road!

Not a sign of horse or cart.

Winding gorges, tricky to trace.

Massive cliffs, who knows how high?

Where the thousand grasses drip with dew, Where the pine trees hum in the wind.

Now the path’s lost, now it’s time For body to ask shadow: ‘Which way home?’

26

21.

Always it’s cold on this mountain!

Every year, and not just this.

Dense peaks, thick with snow.

Black pine-trees breathing mist.

It’s summer before the grass grows, Not yet autumn when the leaves fall.

Full of illusions, I roam here, Gaze and gaze, but can’t see the sky.

22.

No knowing how far it is, This place where I spend my days.

Tangled vines move without a breeze, Bamboo in the light shows dark.

Streams down-valley sob for whom?

Mists cling together, who knows why?

Sitting in my hut at noon, Suddenly, I see the sun has risen.

23.

The everyday mind: that is the way.

Buried in vines and rock-bound caves, Here it’s wild, here I am free, Idling with the white clouds, my friends.

Tracks here never reach the world; No-mind, so what can shift my thought?

I sit the night through on a bed of stone, While the moon climbs Cold Mountain.

24.

I was off to the Eastern Cliff.

Planned that trip for how long?

Dragged myself up by hanging vines, Stopped halfway, by wind and fog.

Thorn snatched my arm on narrow tracks, Moss so deep it drowned my feet, So I stopped, under this red pine.

Head among the clouds, I’ll sleep.

25.

27 Bright water shimmers like crystal, Translucent to the furthest depth.

Mind is free of every thought Unmoved by the myriad things.

Since it can never be stirred It will always stay like this.

Knowing, this way, you can see, There is no within, no without.

26.

Are you looking for a place to rest?

Cold Mountain’s good for many a day.

Wind sings here in the black pines, Closer you are, the better it sounds.

There’s an old man sitting by a tree, Muttering about the things of Tao. Ten years now, it’s been so long This one’s forgotten his way home.

27.

Cold rock, no one takes this road.

The deeper you go, the finer it is.

White clouds hang on high crags.

On Green Peak a lone gibbon’s cry.

What friends do I need?

I do what pleases me, and grow old.

Let face and body alter with the years, I’ll hold to the bright path of mind.

28 MARK MAYER I was born in Singapore and spent my formative years in places such as Dubai and Iran, which instilled a wanderlust in me that makes it difficult to stay in one place all year. While my commercial work has covered the photographic gamut from still-life, studio and location portraiture, aerial photography, and live performance photography. I now make my home in Eagle River, Alaska.

FIVE PHOTOGRAPHAS

29

30

31

32

33 KARI BERT Though he has worked in journalism, schools, and airports, the Flemish artist Kari Bert has always been guided by one driving passion which has expressed itself in painting, poetry, essay and translation. Future work, both written and visual, will appear in The Green Door BALLADE OF A SWEET BARBARIAN It “ flashed upon that inward eye” - a field as far as I could see, a field of potatoes and, lost in the midst of it, a throne with a crowned, sad man, eyes enlarged as bulbs.

He said : ” I am president of the promised land of Banality. I don’t know who made me candidate. I don’t know who elected me. My emporium is a continent of potatoes. Sometimes they celebrate the Holy Potato with rituals empty as a leaking bucket and often there are many cameras in the field served by beings seemingly belonging to the human race; yet I wonder who the hell are the farmers of these fields and who are the owners?

If you are a newspaper man nobody will publish that you have met me for I belong to the world of spectacle and it is a miracle you meet me alone - for I’m alive and dead.”

He disappeared and I heard a horrible ugly, loud music which blinded both my eyes 1 Mirages are real….a human answer.

In the desert of my eye mirages are teeming but, in a fata-morgana, you seeyou see what is behind the horizon.

Hence mirages are real, said the poet, behind the sight-line of an image-making mind.

The more I try to disentangle them the more they swarm the more they teem.

So, when keeping my eye calm, and released, the mirages become clear, readable for my creative imagination, where they float between: ”to be” and “not to be”; where “yes” becomes “no” and “no” becomes “yes”;

34 saying words, uttering sounds, gesturing and winking to the awakening mind of the poet who does not search for words but lets them come with the sweet-smelling wind which waits for the story that congealing and growing within.

This tells, and shows, what I don’t or didn’t know when my mind was self-poisoned in false reasoning; but I am simply breathing now, talking with mirages which give a very human answer.

In poetry no compass -only necessity.

Imagination must be a creation where the body becomes a spirit and the spirit makes a poem with(in) the body.

2 In your shire, poet, impossible flowers bud.

Blossoms utter words which change the colours a painter uses.

Trees talk in a tongue you have to learn with all the inner nerves which then become weavers of the field you make your own.

You forget where you think you are; but what you see and taste is a secret becoming: a tangible and real world open for human eyes giving you hidden fingers to prove that they are as real as the light you can’t see but which allows us to see.

And the miracle is this that we see reality and not a mirage; not the hollow world of swindlers for the reality is beauty; not only in your shire, poet but here here and all over the world.

3 On the bridge I was overtaken by anger.

(The river has no name and is one vortex.)

35

The anger was not only in my mind but in my body also - an anger with a name belonging, and forgotten, to old human sagas, yet new as the dawn is new.

I stood frozen like an icy statue; not even a hole of hope; and the trees on the banks teasing me, smiling like friends: “One step and you are free”, said an unseen human, “it is a hidden power of your own.”

The anger spread over my being I am still waiting to know the one and only * (Prose? : yes .

Poem? : I don’t know).

4 When the urge becomes painful in the innards of the mind one is word blind until the first word comes to the whirling pool of growing pain and the fireworks start with a crowd of unexpected words.

The poet then needs an inner wakeful steady attention of work of being open as a grassy plain is to rain.

His world of words needs searching, finding, forgetting, knowing, work, as a carpenter, mason, farmer, mastering his craft of finding and of making.

Troubadour he is and maker: the juggler is someone else.

5

36

My first word was: word.

Then came the world in which I found so many hollow words plunging me in sorrow and wakefulness.

My craft now is to forget and to remember the living, inward master of that unforgotten word 6 Sitting and seeing the sea-sand alone on the beach sea and its sand as it was in the beginning of life on earth I am, in one breath, one of the first humans and one of the last.

Thus began life I feel and become aware that feeling is the origin of the urge to know and the origin of those images which exist within me.

The emotion of intelligence is the mobile and the motion of the worded images that arise on this abandoned beach where I am part of the whole - sea, sand, sky, the clouds the overwhelming smell of an all-embracing wind bringing me images unseen by any but making me human using words to talk to the seascape

37 (and to you on the horizon).

7 The deep blue curtain of the stage with an orange “I” painted on it, opened, and the backstage was as blue as the curtain, between which both hazy and vague figures danced in an awkward way.

As I sat there a cat was lying on my legs and seeing her eyes she brooded on ideas unknown to me.

Slowly the figures dissolved in a thin smoke and left no traces.

I read in the eyes of the cat: “They were mirages and they are back in the backstage of your heart.”

They were mirages of the desert in my inward eye, but, said a voice: “they are yours and you have to use poetry to talk about them. As your deary said, poetry translates what language cannot say, so sharpen your craftsmanship as poetry is a craft to word the meaning of those mirages and not trying to say who they are.”

This is the beginning of making my craft less awkward, and the words on this page are the witnesses.

I’ll search to see the mirages with a clear eye - or searching for them in the deeper layers and remembering them as buds that have to germinate into poems.

Up to now I only know that those mirages are mine and real, so real, in my mind.

8 And the cave dweller said: You are a seedbed and poetry is sowing-seed that can bud in a field.

If your germs of imagination root in good earth and are laboured by you in all its layers where echoes become living sounds with their own life on both sides of your sky-line between real creative images and those that can be seen with an awakened happy eye - seen in writing, heard in speech, belonging to the two worlds.

Speaking further leads me to the intended confusion of tongues of the self-crowned two-faced high priests

38

Whereas we – we are proud cave-dwellers let us never forget this deeply necessary lesson.

9 A painter spoke to himself: Do not ask that the light should be blessed but ask the light to bless your eyes with light.

What you see spreads over your whole being, your whole body.

Even in the dark caverns of memory.

Even lower in the layers of forgotten treasures.

If a painter works he should constantly remember this forgotten truth.

If a painter makes a huge mistake crying like a curse, it is the light that reveals it in his eyes and lower in his being.

Because of the light we know the wrong paths, because of the light we search the right paths.

So let the light bless his own light, for light and eyes work in utmost silence together.

Should they forget they will be blind - looking without seeing – no knowledge - nothing nut an empty awareness which imitates words instead of speaking.

Hollow speech on every corner.

Where they bury their understanding.

And they do it yes they do it “loud and clear”.

10 Half of the landscape is black in my eye, so I don’t know where the charming salamander, flirting with the sun comes from. Is her sweet charm intended for what it is or is it a subtle sorcery?

In my world of words half of it is unknown; and although it is my land the salamander said: “Hey, Landlord “, then vanished within the dark part of my retina, laughing.

Did she send the crowd of very visible ants? Or am I simply half blind and therefore cannot be a bowman?

39 I think the salamander was a witch sent by…. who knows? . But she’ll teach me how to fly and not crash into misleading clouds.

As the ants, the salamander, and dark land are mine, I open my hands and wait, not aiming a target.

11 Bringing the words closer to each other let the sparks jump over one to the other make new words to surprise the ears and the watching mind cross-pollination with sounds in a way that echoes are suddenly saying more than what they usually say.

Language is conjuring without tricks - but with words until they become so filled with a sense no clods of sounds are wandering about; those which are used to catching nothing of what lies safe in a word and not hidden in well sounding pulp a plain meaning in a sun for those who capture a word and perceive the clear or unclear core.

12 In the vortex of thoughts my land became dark, with one bright spot in which I saw my Deary, laughing and opening her hands, as I had done unaware at first and she invited me to dance as we did ignoring prescribed steps, but doing them; being music and no more; forgetting the lessons but doing what was they intended; forgetting the intention; , both with open, receiving, knowing hands.

“What your open hands did will be the only sign, from now. You’ll know without their language but with ours for we are the faithful of love : fideli d’amore. “ 13 I’m seeing a red flower in the ivy of forgotten words and see a deep red rose playing dumbly with the sun of dawn.

40

When a breeze came, moving the ivy, I heard, in a sudden urgency: “Eastre” and in the same strong glimpse, a bird sitting on my hand, and humming in the ivy.

The rose smiled. Eastre joined her.

I was witness of my mind; witness of the swarm of hastened words, awake, warm, wanting to be uttered in the splendid dawn the splendid ivy the wonderful painting I saw growing under an invisible hand, but it became grey and black as words entered the dark anthill and I could not even hear the silence.

Sea: white and not moving; sun and horizon concealed behind an unknown breath. (I cannot be the beachcomber of myself) In a quick glitter the bird Eastre sat on my hand and said: “Dig in your heart and your love shall come and whisper – you will understand and do not lend an ear to others, the key is in the midst of the one you call “I” but don’t argue with him; the way of Eastre is a harsh one.

It is better that the “I” should limp instead of listening to hollow swindlers.”

Gone, then she was gone and the limping began.

I ignore the hollow questions of the world.

14 An inner urge wants to write about this sheet of paper.

The whole white sheet where scrambled letters disturb scraped words.

It was white, waiting for words as the sky above the sea waits for my eyes that can’t follow the course - or refuse to do so.

White paper is not a mirror, not a trap net, for what is in my head and jumps there, staggers, makes me err, and makes itself into a maze where lover strike (like a bowman) something for which he (i.e., the poet) has no word.

41 The unwritten hides in the bushes of my awareness and doesn’t see the pages.

Remove the paper and it is changing into crap Where I looked for speech; where I searched the umbilical chord leading me to the womb.

But it is right to write such things as: “Hello paper filled with characters; hello lost path”?

The void of the white sheet is filthy forever.

No return.

But there is still a white one waiting for to-morrow.

15 You coming, white as white gulls screeching against the grey sky, is happiness my dear To dance hand in hand along the keyboard of your face, dancing with green and red and birdsongs, and juggling with nine rainbows.

Your eyes are geraniums, your eyes, your pure eyes, we will hide them behind the bushes and in the summer noon of our rest, hearing music in the lazy streets, through the open windows of our eyes, reckless and high tightrope walking.

Happiness is where the infirmed laugh their pain away Where naked children play in warmth and sand and innocence Where I pluck a bouquet out of the sun warmed woods of my youth.

The children in us will reach out for the goldfish bowl, for the green bowl of our happiness But will let them glide from their little fingers.

16 My bluebird left my dulcimer, leaving me with a hole in my thinking.

I took the broken Madonna and whispered in her ear: “Bring my bird back”.

But she was unable to do anything - she was also broken.

42 I felt like a sailor who missed his boat, for he had a hangover and now all those islands with amazing names are behind the horizon like merry whores in a mist.

The day after that I found a sheet of paper and a pen on my table. There was message on it: “Teach yourself poetry and do not trust teachers, write smiling verses and throw the sorrow away and those ugly complaints for your way will come as you walk on it.�

17 A tomcat and a lioness looking at each other on this page one hundred and one questions without question marks filled and empty questions wherein words are sucked and become grey again except for one flashing red rocket and, in the shady darkness, an (un)ashamed kiss: the rest evaporates only the kiss remains only in the poem only in the story only in the madness that I love.

Epilogue Suddenly in a flash I saw a word climbing the ridge of the mountain searching his hidden hollow and hiding as a shadow without the noise roaming in me searching an issue to escape my thoughts, where for me he was absent.

43 Hidden and hence invisible, he grew in me, not written nor heard, but budding in my innermost as in a deafening silence but refusing to be pronounced, as he was hiding in his hill.

And then in a flash he was not in his cave anymore, nor in mine.

And so the pursuit began : I searched in all places the word, the first word that will grasp me suddenly and the other words will follow, although I am now still deaf and dumb, but I know that very first word will not be a cry nor a shouting, but the beginning of the search for the language hiding in me in a flood of words that I’ll only understand the instant I hear them understand them very slowly like a river where I’ll swim and sail a boat through the whirlpools like all the words that can be heard and (even) understood.

44 NIN ANDREWS Nin Andrews received her BA from Hamilton College and her MFA from Vermont College.

The recipient of two Ohio Arts Council grants, she is the author of several books including The Book of Orgasms, Spontaneous Breasts, Why They Grow Wings, Midlife Crisis with Dick and Jane, Sleeping with Houdini, and Dear Professor, Do You Live in a Vacuum. She also edited Someone Wants to Steal My Name, a book of translations of the French poet, Henri Michaux. Her book, Southern Comfort, is forthcoming from CavanKerry Press.

Creation Story: On the island where I grew up, in the story of creation, the goddess created woman in her own image, and man as her after-image. Woman’s job on earth was to name and love man and all the other animals. Man’s job was to rebel, to challenge, to ponder. For this reason, the first woman was all light, carrying a glow in her belly like a small sun, but the first man was cold inside, his only glow a dim reflection of her own. While the woman was soft and sensitive and smooth, the man was leathery and numb. The woman often wondered, when stroking the man’s belly at night, trying to warm and tame him as she tamed the other animals, if he had swallowed rocks instead of apples or plums. After all, he was always so hungry, seeking more and more food and love, forever snuffling around for the crumbs others left behind. Maybe that’s why he stayed awake at night, staring at the stars, asking why he was so small compared to the sky, why he should trust this life that came in such tiny increments of time and washed over him in waves, as illogical and lovely as the woman’s mind.

How the Woman Saved Man: What can I do to save man? the woman asked the goddess night after night as man, an insomniac stayed awake, staring at the sky, raging at his own inadequacies.

Why? he raged at the goddess. Why am I small, so hairless and weak compared to the rest of the animals? Why am I mortal when you are not? Why is there no meaning in my life?

And so it was that the goddess grew tired of the man’s rage and created orgasms. After every orgasm the man at last slept the sleep of the stones. That was when woman began to gripe.

On the island where I grew up, only women hold political office. During nearly every election season a certain man runs for mayor, for governor, or even for president. A certain man tries to rally the men to his cause.

He flaps his arms wildly, thrusts his fist in the air, shouts his demands for equal rights, pay, respect, representation . . . Of course, nothing happens. Everyone knows nothing will ever change. No one will elect a man with a temper, a man with a loud voice and many demands.

No one will elect a man who sounds and acts like a man.

How the Women Treat the Angry Man:

45 On the island where I grew up, the women are very understanding of the angry man. The women are so very empathetic. They know men have needs. Men are like paper. They catch fire so easily. (Even the women sometimes burst into flames, though rarely. Still, they know what it’s like.) And so they do their best to calm the angry man. They wrap him in warm towels and touch him with cool soothing hands. They play Mozart for him or send him outside for a walk on the beach. They even listen to his rants and raves until he is quiet at last. Until he is at peace. In short they treat him as they would like to be treated. And they go to bed at night feeling very pleased with themselves.

Notes on Vagina Envy : 1. Behind the beard, the beers, the machismo, is a man who feels lost, like a tiny boat in a vast ocean, a rocket ship in a dark sky.

2. No one knows the cause of the mental illness, though psychologists blame the early weaning of male children. A boy should be suckled until he is three years old, the research suggests. Otherwise the boy will grow up with an insatiable hunger for a woman’s breasts.

3. Sometimes the symptoms are subtle. A young man in one case study refused to go out at night, became moody, distant, and rarely saw friends. Alone, he stared at the wall, and when asked if he was okay, he didn’t answer. He couldn’t. He was wrapped up in a sorrow so deep, even the words would not rise from his throat.

4. Love of death is a common symptom of vagina envy. The men who suffer from the sickness nod and say yes whenever they meet death. They like to pick up rifles, pistols, and hand grenades. Sometimes they look at one another and say, Let’s go, Boys. Let’s blow up this fucking place. A thrill runs their veins.

5. In cultures where the illness runs rampant, women are despised for their laughter, their wisdom, their sexuality. The hatred becomes a fire that spreads from house to house.

Untreated the hatred cannot be contained. Men become so enraged, they burn women at the stake or stone them in the plaza at the centre of their towns.

DAVID WHITMARSH KNIGHT: David Whitmarsh-Knight was educated at Dulwich College; University of Pennsylvania (Thouron Scholar); University of New Brunswick (Doctoral Fellow of the Canada Council); Graduate Education studies at University of New England; Graduate Theology and Religion studies at St. Andrews College, Sydney University.

Senior Lecturer 1, (R). Tenured at the University of New South Wales: various career positions held in Australia, Canada and the United Kingdom include Head of Graduate Studies; Head of School, Liberal Arts and Sciences; and Department Head of English; and History and Theory of Art Academic Fields: English and Textual Criticism; Palaeography; The Dead Sea Scrolls; Phenomenology of Religion and Education; Aesthetics and Mythology; History of the Stage; Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama and Theatre; 19th and 20th Century English and European Literature and Drama.

46

WILLIAM BLAKES JERUSALEM EXPLAINED This massive study (612 pages) of Jerusalem presents the first full-scale, virtually line-by-line analysis of Blake’s great epic. Each of Jerusalem’s four chapters is seen as a unique chiamus, contracting in all directions from circumference to centre, and after Divine intervention, reversing the vortex and flowing back to the circumference. In Plates 94-100 of Jerusalem, the great four-fold chiasmus of all four chapters visualized simultaneously is completed. So clear is the geometry of this architecture it can be graphically illustrated.

Blake’s multi-linear narrative is comprehensively detailed, and the elements of his superb mythology explained, line-by-line, such that every line and event is seen and understood in terms of every other line and all events. The “golden string” of his chiastic spiritual adventure is clearly followed so that the reader understands each part of the poem in terms of its crafted aesthetic unity as a whole. Each of the great prophesies The Four Zoas, Milton and Jerusalem have very different mythologies though with many like components that cannot be transported and made to fit any other. To understand Blake’s great prophecies it is essential to reveal the different set of mythic events that Blake writes and envisions in art and in printed manuscript, and this is the first study to successfully trace the multi-linear narrative of Jerusalem.

Blake creates a cosmology of human consciousness in Jerusalem. It takes us into Albion’s inner worlds of trauma and withdrawal into madness, and the processes of intervention ‘without’ and ‘within’ that lead to his healing into unity and sanity. Brilliantly traced by Blake, we read of Albion’s divided mental and physical energies ‘within’ as his masculine and feminine disconnect, collapse and disintegrate in the four chiastic vortices of each of the four chapters. To the collapsing and compacting component energies that travel the vortical spirals within each vortex, it seems they travel a ‘line’. To Blake, the corresponding perceptual limitations are two-fold vision. By contrast, to Blake’s prophetic three-fold vision the entities collapse into four unique vortices of concentration and expansion, until Albion’s final awakening to four-fold unity in Plates 94-100.

Albion’s divided masculine and feminine energies separate into phallo-centrism and nature worship respectively and mutually predate the other’s energies for power, nourishment and sexual survival. Thus, Albion contracts into madness and self-annihilation as his divided inner energies seek to enslave and sacrifice each other. These hubristic expressions in Albion’s perceptual strategies ‘within’ are symbolized by Blake’s zoas and emanations.

David Whitmarsh’s understanding of these figures and their psycho-physical interactions, demonstrates for the first time, Blake’s mythology in Jerusalem is shown to be profoundly reasonable.

In modern terms, Blake’s myth and geometry should be seen as symbolizing a quantum, multi-linear mythic exploration of human experience in pursuit of reconciliation. In each dimension of Blake’s four vortices of human psycho-physicality, Albion’s divided masculine and feminine energies are reconciled through four-fold intervention into unity and sanity in love. Albion’s catatonic self-separation from four-fold energy, and the concomitant hubristic self-deception, chaotic sexuality, loss of faith and suicidal pursuit of component power over the self as a whole, is given imaginative dramatic form in Blake’s epic.

47 Blake’s visionary landscapes are explored by David Whitmarsh in terms of Trinitarian theology and the theology of Divine self-communication, and Blake is shown to be no confused religious anarchist. To these theological perspectives is added the necessary explanations of Blake’s prophetic understandings of time and space, or his mystical perception of the holy in all living energy forms; this is placed in the context of clear multidimensional perceptual strategies, and modern quantum philosophies of science, Black Hole cosmologies and apocalyptic global and personal psychological issues. To the secular reader, David Whitmarsh points to Blake’s depth psychology and analysis of catatonic withdrawal and the journey within into madness and self-destruction, and, a return to sanity through external intervention.

This book is also a creative experiment, for here is the first critical work on Blake that is written in an analogy to hyper/text/novel form. Thus, a reader may start anywhere in the poem and navigate from any textual unit, to any other, in any order and yet still have the poem explained in terms of its whole. Shelley Jackson’s The Patchwork Girl, a virtual classic, offers the analogy. The heroine is Mary Shelley who finds a body unfinished by Frankenstein and she finishes it. It is female and they become lovers. The novel is the stories of the past owners of the body’s bits and pieces, like mouth, eyes, hands and feet etc, and the reader reads the virtual text, anywhere, in any order and follows any route not confined to a single linear literary experience.

This modern hyper-text form has analogies to the work of Blake two centuries earlier. We see Albion’s collapse into catatonic trauma ‘within’, and sexual division and self-harming madness, and Blake symbolizes the story of Albion’s interior processes with physical components like skull, blood, ears, eyes, tongue, nose, heart and bowels. Many complaints made by the current popular received wisdom of Ault et al. and his post-modern/poststructuralist school, and equally by Frye et al. and the thematic/mythic school are answered by David Whitmarsh; especially those of transition, structure and consistency. Definitively presented by him for the first time as key stable structural issues are: first, the poem’s stages of development and chiastic structure of circumference/centre/circumference, and the consequent stable beginning; second, it’s chiastic, causal multi-linear narrative myth that is like a spiral of narrative events within a vortex, concentrating into a compact density at its core, and exploding into a counter vortex; and third, the gathering of the poem’s major sequences of events into a coherent apocalyptic closure in Plates 94-100.

David Whitmarsh’s study should mean it cannot reasonably be claimed that Jerusalem opens arbitrarily, that the myth is fractal and erratic, incoherent and impenetrable, and the poem is self-subverted into failure and thus founders on its apocalypse. His original critical methodology in defense of Blake’s creative integrity allows a reader to directly encounter the genius of Blake’s dramatic characters without any ‘wall of words’ between his poetry, its meanings, and a reader. Uniquely this study offers a fresh way to see the ‘golden string’ of his narrative causality through Blake’s four very different levels of perceptual strategy and their poetry of transitions between each of the levels: namely Blake’s four-fold, three-fold, two-fold and one-fold vision. David Whitmarsh’s work is unique for it is thought impossible to complete such an analysis.

Thus, for the first time, gone is Blake the impenetrable, plotless, incoherent writer of a failed poetic in Jerusalem. In its place is Blake, a genius of crafted plot construction, and a writer and artist whose multi-linear narrative vision is not only profoundly embedded in traditional themes, symbolic and dramatic structures, and prophetic rhetorical syntax; but also

48 profoundly modern in experimental form, multiple viewpoints and linear and multi-linear structures of poetry and art.

49

MARTIN BURKE Is a widely published Irish poet-playwright. The present work is an extract from a longer series of poems dealing with various poets whose style, themes, and attitudes he has adapted and adopted for his own ends.

HOMAGE TO ODYSSEUS ELYTIS May I speak for the necessities the luminous untrammelled by restrictive deities:the shimmer-haze on the horizon the horizon that is another beginning?

Each to his own weapons I said as over the world I’ll make the sign of the pomegranate (in honour of that poet) as over the world I’ll post my sentries not, as you might suspect, to bar the way but to open the way, to give a bright welcome to the beautiful one when he arrives ONE 1 Not knowing brevity I sang brevity - expectation filling my lungs, the heart satisfied for a moment Waiting where the sea was, bowing before the water-goddess, translating all to her sacred aims, landscaping a life accordingly Swimming in waves so as not to sink, engaging in metaphors Greek to the core though I did not know what that would mean: singing for gods, singing for men; hoping to clothe, unclothe myself in the caves of prophecy.

2 Placing my lips to the conch of the world I sang of the world Nothing if not ardent I was obedient in all the necessary ways yet, should I now sing, what would I add to the world?

Yet master, teacher, brother, friend (I dare call you by these beautiful names) the sea that unites us now divides us for you have learned death’s jealous wisdom One more bond between us - that pull of the moon on the waves of the heart before which I

50 bow in liberty and remembrance 3 Bird, you whose shadow falls on this page, in your relentless beauty is that justice I thought only poetry capable of Shadow from a well of shadows hunkering for the light yet your innocence remains primordial, untouched by the blatant forces of decay So, until death comes disguised as itself, I will adhere to your blameless judgements arriving as only they can arrive in shadow-retaining ink.

4 Not knowing beauty but singing beauty. Greece appeared in every poem disguised as a sailor or pilgrim. I followed Disguising myself as one or the other, drinking the sun in fabulous locations, crossing from a niche of time into another niche Beginning and ending in the one moment though there are no ends the heart will subscribe to not as it walks by the olives and figs, not as it sings by the sea.

5 Earth, air, fire, stone, song - I stood by a river and called for the boatman but what answered me was neither human nor not-human I felt I should utter a cry of praise, that I should bow to the hand which shaped the world thus yet even that was not enough Again I called, again It appeared - one who was pleasing, speaking a language unlike any I knew yet, somehow, I understood “Sing for me” “I do not sing except that you sing” Earth, air, fire, stone, song - out of this I constructed what I call ‘the soul’ As again that bird flew to say that from his shadow and speech all chronicles would be written 6 Citizen, exile, sailor, pilgrim -I moved between town and wood Adam of the earth’s brightness, the clay of the world adopting speech to address me: “Then I

51 will address all things and shout the battle-call of the soul!”

How those words escaped me I do not know but they could not be rescinded speaking as they did my duty and joy To walk the many side-roads of the world, to conspire with Greece against the world, to live in the world for the sake of the world To live so as to dance TWO The essentials? - luminosity and tranparency: we creatures outliving the dark in which we were weaned; compositions of balance and imperfections; yet something splendid stirrs in our bones Swimming naked in the sea, or calling like a suckling child to its mother; eager for a vivid metaphore with which to address the significences of the world Stone from one period, Icons from another, and someone suggesting the (possible) use of pure color to indicate “the divine"- truth captured by metaphore, a revelation and its scripture - yes, what would we not give for that?

So thus (and in its archaic usage) certain words revealed themselves to me as my vocation: something now sneered at, laughed at, decried, by the loud ones who seeks to silence every voice Thus the new orthadoxy reinstates the old accusation: that we are dealers of ‘truth’ and ‘light’ that this is the world Keats walked out of (that world the new world has abandoned) that to swim naked is as useless a gesture as writing a poem on water.

There is nothing that can be said that has not already been said. Yet when all is said not enough has been said for the Angel’s form is more potent than the demons who make it their enemy, so pardon me if I cite a tradition you thought to be extinct The word conceals whatever it expresses but this is no negation of its core; no shadow-play to cancel the light; no striptease-show to damn us into silence Light is the deep dark we enter; a pilgrims route, begining in unkowing to arrive at…..a path through the undergrowth where a story awaits the accurate voice; or failing that a voice to say that such a story exists.

It has a name but I do not know it. I only know it surpasses us/ surprises us - which is as close to ‘defination’ as I am ever likely to go I come to the world with my unknowing yet what is more precious, more necessary, lucid, or transparent, than colours suggesting auroral dark?

I come with affinities and hericies; refugee more than citizen; one of the new barbarians

52 camped outside the city walls; one with a chant to shatter those walls where love is the cause which batters the walls with a song.

(I am telling you all my secrets now as if they were a source of pride and not of shame) Yet out of that pit of erosion, of death, it is given to draw a word indestructable and eternal.

Shadows interlock to copulate; something dies but something suvives; the crucifixion occurs in every life – Yet, with grace, so also the resurrection Theory follows theory, replaces a theory but the crucifixion continues. Shadows have had their glory but are gone where no living breath will follow. We interlock or copulate we make our breath our signature.

Then if not with water or auroral dark with what can a poem be written?

I enter border-zones; fault-lines are everywhere; two choirs contend yet only one has a viable word I salvage light from dark - a history predating history which poetry gives the carbon date of; the luminous answering our needs by which it,and we, remain vital to the earth I see the knots of history – Heraclitus to Christ; various forms of the same form; voice of necessity speaking in/to the world; showing this world, showing those others; a reality to which our rights outranks our betrayals Water I step into has been stepped into before. I give it a name, someother gives it another.

Heraclitus, when speaking of here and hereafter, speaks of a harmony of opposed tensions; something only a Greek could say with conviction enough to satisfy the world A signature, a breath on which if the poem is not spoken it will have no life but be an empty mouth talking to an empty mouth where nothing will be said A breath lays itself upon a breath. You see this in Holderlin, Lorca, Celan, in others –they are few but they exist: those who move beyond fashion or have never entered it; those whose luminisoty offers a befitting reply to “Wozu Dichter in durftiger Zeit?”

Thus if I inherit one I inherit every tradition. An exactitude which finds a parallel in that landscape Hans Memiling brightly pained to show the dark of rooms I now walk through I am whatever I have become and want to be no other though where I move Vondel once moved

53 And there are footprints on the path beside the river How could I suspect? How could I know this would become my obligation? That to swim naked in the sea was to call to the mother? Was to write a poem of water with the density of stone?

As much as those who precede me I have learned to surprise myself by what they have to show.

They speak, calmly but with determination of conviction to say the luminous is necessary; that we are a child of water and stone; that water is the world’s abiding ink; that the shadows on a page of ink are the shadows of the heart When the past enters the present; when the bird stirs within the stone; when all the water turns to ink - the future happens!

What I inherit I transmit; becomes your own; yet in this we are speaking of efforts and intents not yet of final success Whatever I speak has already become a translation in my mouth. A shadow remains to cast a Shadow visible only in a certain shade of light Yes, much fades, falls into darkness, falls out of time, yet essential necessity remains; a second, a third translation perhaps, yet such water contains enduring ink Greece falls into my heart (as much as I have fallen into it) to become my essential homeland; silence enters the dialogue but the dialogue is not mute.

I have winnowed history. I do not come to this table with empty hands. See –in the wood I am carving a poem like initials of love on a tree.

I think this is how all revelation enters the world: sap oozing through carved words to spark the mind’s delight; a juice out of the past enlightened by the present Or something so new it shatters the world and every tree thereafter carries those letters like a luminous word to those who wait to catch the sap of spring Forgive me. Even now I grow nostalgic for the future. Yet the past extends itself in ways that cannot be ignored The tree that grows in Patmos, grows in Golgotha; grows again in the mind for its, and our, Necessity: Judas-tree, Christ –tree, where one tree is enough to change the world and alter the possible future Such a tree is added to the weapons I possess.

Shall I name them again or do their shadows fall across the common language that we speak – that language no ideology can shroud in blood or flame or pain ; language residing at the edge of ourselves where, and by which, the spirit is formed

54 The hands which hold the sun in their palms will be blessed by blessed pain – a moment which on behalf of, every poem is written.

Those hands are cast into cooling water to cool The vapour rising from the vat becomes the template for this poem.

THREE Turn to the sea -where the island nests in perfect form -where there are tides and necessities Where in doing so you are turning to yourself with expectations of revelations, with the certainty that something will happen Where it already has You have departed You will return You will never be the same The island I call Patmos another calls Ithaca - I live with this contradiction without finding it a contradiction As if one word equalled another or can celled all opposites, or brought them to a solid mass of rock in the sea we call Aegean When, let us admit it, we are always and only talking about the sea within ourselves.

You have departed You will return You will never be the same So, we are speaking of ‘revelations’ - of Ithaca without vengeance or sordid triumphs prefiguring the camps and railways carriages shunting east and west across our century We are speaking of Patmos –but not of dogma, vestments, or sterile rituals. We are, let us admit it again, talking of ourselves in the only way that we can speak Of a name within a name.

So, the sailor sets out with the name of a harbour but not with a chart.

This unknowing is part of knowing - indeed, there are sailors for whom charts are a blasphemy against their art – So let us agree: what they know is worth knowing: that perhaps we are as transient as our fears but that we are as essential as our joys.

55

You have departed You will return You will never be the same Ithaca - Patmos - Aran – What is an island but our longing for it?

We dress in masks of many names to woo the revelations.

* Dear one Dear darkling shade Unwind the sheet that I have wound Out of my knowing and unknowing From which this poem is made.

Let dark’s deep wisdom complement the light I sough to be the singer of.

Into darkness I have gone With many impious words: Change my state – change my song Give me the voice of birds FOCUS Focus is an occasional section which, in rather than a series of random links, will present a closer look at, and presentation of, publishers, writers, etc, which the editors feel will be of interest to readers LAPWING PRESS Working out of Belfast, Dennis Greig has been one of the great inspirations of Irish and English poetry without getting bogged down in unnecessary definitions of what those terms might mean. Mercifully free of dogma or cant Lapwing Press has presented a series of poets and poetry books that any publisher would be proud of and any poet would be proud to be associated with. It is with pleasure that The Green Door presents his comments It became very obvious twenty years ago that conventional 'structures' in poetry publishing could not and did not serve the human imperative to celebrate or commiserate in the literary forms we call poetry.

Yes, they did serve and still do serve an almost priestly elite that are the product of the collegiate system. There was an absence of 'accessibility' to participate in poetry creation and publication. When 'access to the arts' became a buzz word a while back there simply wasn't the mechanisms in place to absorb creative production and give parity of esteem to those who were 'strangers at the gate'. In spite of universal education in these islands an hierarchical system is still self-perpetuating. One solution to the problem could be a dumbing-down of literary education and so remove 'poetry' from the grasp of the masses.

The conventions of publishing and printing were and still are guarantees that an expensive business remains an expensive cultural luxury. The traditional machine processes of

56 production and labour costs of prepress work restricted the sharing of this communal wine. It is true that in the affairs of humankind, the canons and surviving texts are not those of the masses but of a social, political and economic elite. That is still very much the position today.

It is something that Lapwing ignores in its aspirational credo of liberty, equality and fraternity. In the absence of belief there is only money.

The world changed with the advent of the computer age. Still, a kind of crass snobbery prevails in terms of very expensive booksetting programmes and the selection processes of who and what to publish and how. There have been the expensive 'marketing' procedures of the last half century which have not returned any great new increase of product sales in spite of the thousands of poems submitted to competitions every year. This points to an unavoidable reality that there are more people writing than buying poetry.

I am not sure that poetry publishers have caught up with the new technology that can transform the day-to-day processes to a sharper writer focused system or a reaching out to a wider readership. Fine to have a mention in The Times or any other pedestalled publication, the trouble is that few people actually read those if declining circulation figures are to be believed. Imagine the headstone 'Reviewed in the London Review of Books'.

A normal period of the process from 'under consideration' to actual publication could run for two years and more. The publisher gives due consideration to the material and its 'fit' into the established house style followed by the lengthy process of application for funds, the prepress work and production. The theory is that this results in 'quality' writing being published. Yet, upon what grounds are those qualitative decisions based? Prevailing taste within the group of advisors to funding bodies is partially the answer.

It’s a bit like language becoming designed by Ikea and poetry becoming Feng Shuied. And what of the new which fits no known paradigm of 'good' writing? Slush pile it.

With the taxpayer funding such a regime there can be no independent press. We have a wealth of poetry that is good by any standard but we must encourage experimentation otherwise like heart surgery we will become a nation of procedure followers rather than leaders of invention.

The universality of computers and related technical developments grew to the point that noncraft trained people could produce the end-product. As well as that, book production was and is often farmed out to low-cost economies resulting in the present situation in which a publisher could send raw data down the line to prepress and print companies based in India and China where high quality books and expensive colour productions can be made and delivered for pennies a copy. All this in the name of profit.

If work is shipped out of these islands then the print trades will suffer and have already done so. So we could have a system in which state funding is financing unemployment within the affected home nations.

The internet has provided a universal forum for cultural exchange as well as a means of production and distribution of the cultural product - poetry. Even so, the fractional per cent of poetry buyers ensures that hard copy production will always be a cultural loss-leader and commercial suicide.

The value of American digital book sales is touching a billion dollars this year, so far, and there is a race between gizmo manufacturers to hit the top spot in terms of e-readers.

57 None of this has opened the doors in the conventional poetry world to admit those beyond the Pale of exclusivity which prevails in that world.

Lapwing has always followed the line of 'positive deviation' which quite often clashes with writers' own 'horizon of expectation'. It has clashed with the set formulae that ensures the parochial will survive in an ever shrinking global system. We aim to present a poetry that runs parallel to the established literary order.

People have been influenced along the lines of 'monkey see, monkey do' whereas the harsh reality is that new poetry publishing in these islands represents less than 1 per cent of the annual publishing output. Set against the commercial side of the balance sheet there could be set the higher aesthetic quality and secular innate quality of poetry. Perhaps that is romantic tosh, but how can we explain the persistence of 'poetry' before and after Auschwitz and other inhumanities we manage to perpetrate upon each other?

Poetry is perhaps then like modern religion in the west, a very broad church full of almost empty pews. We have to exclude those religions in which misery triumphs over humanity.

The business of book reviews is another expectation. However, review vehicles often depend on subscription for survival rather than over-the-counter sales. Which means book reviews can only be read by those with access to the journals. With the threatened cuts to library services, yet another outlet for reviews is about to get the chop. Again, the Internet can salvage that aspect of our culture and save it from going under.

The net outcome of these restrictions on access to participation also excludes people from the interchange and exchange of cultural modes and experience.

For that reason and the sheer hell of it Lapwing produces bi-lingual translations but, in the case of Irish not so much due to the work of eminent publishers such as Cosceim in both Irish language and translation publishing.

How will we know what other people in other places and circumstances are writing unless translated into the English language and if their work is not made available at the local level?

Lorna Shaughnessey has made contemporary central American Spanish work available through her publishers and Bloodaxe has a long history of bringing European poetry to an English readership. We starve ourselves and become literary cannibals feeding on our own past if we do not look up from the ditch of 'Irish Writing'. Mind you that shuck is a treasure house in its own right.

It is obvious now after twenty years in publishing that the conventional structures are not working to emancipate poets from the old and perhaps fascist cultural paradigm of 'values' and status. Economics are a big factor and the shift towards a more commercial 'book selling' mode is cutting into the traditional routes to publication.

Central to what I consider the new mode of doing things is the importance of the poet at local level and the inevitable overspill into the national and international poetry community. We cannot all be jet-set commuters to poetry events around the world, some of us can hardly afford the bus fare to the job centre. The literary life, in spite of generally low rates of return to writers for years of effort, is not a comfortable place to be. It is though observable that

58 poetry publishing has been mollycoddled over the past half century or so and generated a false vitality and range of expectations that can no longer be met by the state.

Being independent has ensured that Lapwing exists in a state of impecunious liberty. It also means it has freed itself from many of the conventions that have grown around poetry publishing. If not exactly part of the established broad literary church we may be the poorman's gospel hall or the mass-rock of the dispossessed.

Dennis Greig 12-11-2010 CERVENA BARVA PRESS Cervena Barva Press was founded in April of 2005 by Gloria Mindock. The press publishes poetry, fiction, and plays. I look for work that is unique and has a strong voice. I have been publishing translations and plan on publishing more work from different countries. There are not enough translations published in the USA. I want to be a press that brings more foreign writing here to be read. So far, the press has published writers from the Czech Republic, Belgium, Poland, Netherlands, Argentina, Belgium, Romania, Canada, just to name a few.

We have published many American writers too.

I am open to all forms of work. Work is mostly solicited but I have an open reading period from January 2nd-February 10th of each year. This way the door is never closed to discovering new manuscripts that I like. Every year, the press has a poetry and fiction chapbook contest. Details can be found always on our submissions page for guidelines.

Cervena Barva Press publishes a newsletter every month. The newsletter contains interviews with authors and editors, book reviews, new Cervena Barva Press titles, press news, a Raves section which mentions new books out by writers and by what publisher, and new titles in The Lost bookshelf.

If you wish to subscribe to our newsletter, please send an e-mail to: editor@cervenabarvapress.com On our Webpages, you will find a readings link where we list readings from all over the USA. We will list readings from other countries if they are sent to us. Cervena Barva Press will exchange links with writers, publishers, blogs, and magazines. All you have to do is e-mail requesting an exchange.

Check out our links page. http://www.cervenabarvapress.com/links.htm You will find other links www.cervenabarvapress.com

on

our

home

pages

so

be

sure

to

visit

at:

Another service offered is selling books on consignment for writers and publishers in the Cervena Barva Press bookstore called, The Lost Bookshelf. We sell books in poetry, fiction, memoir, plays, non-fiction, and CD’s of poetry. We take 30% of the sale and the author/publisher gets the rest.

You can read more about this and our guidelines for shipping books at: www.thelostbookshelf.com Recently, Cervena Barva Press has published: Clear Eye Tea by Mary Bonina, Triage by Tam Lin Neville, Everything Happens Suddenly by Roberta Swann, Profane Uncertainties by Luis

59 Raul Calvo (Buenos Aires, Argentina) Live Landscape by Andrey Gritsman, What May Have Been: Letters of Jackson Pollack & Dori G" by Susan Tepper and Gary Percesepe. , and chapbooks by Joan Gelfand, Elaine Terranova, Jendi Reiter, Susan Lewis, Stacia Fleegal, Hugh Fox, Daniel Y. Harris and Adam Shechter.

About Gloria Mindock: Gloria Mindock is the author of La Porţile Raiului (Ars Longa Press, 2010, Romania) translated into the Romanian by Flavia Cosma, Nothing Divine Here (U Soku Stampa, Montenegro, 2010), Blood Soaked Dresses (Ibbetson Street Press, 2007) and three chapbooks.

She is editor of Cervena Barva Press, the Istanbul Literary Review, an online journal based in Istanbul, Turkey and X-Peri. She has had numerous publications in the USA and abroad. Her poetry has been translated into Romanian and Spanish. From 1984-1994, Gloria was editor of the Boston Literary Review/BLuR. She has been nominated for a Pushcart Prize, St. Botolph Award, and was awarded a fellowship from the Massachusetts Cultural Council distributed by the Somerville Arts Council. Her new book, Whiteness of Bone, is forthcoming. Recently, Cervena Barva Press was awarded a SUR Translation Support Award from Buenos Aires, Argentina with translator Flavia Cosma , to publish a book by Luis Raul Calvo.

THE RED CEILINGS: A publishing venture publishing individual poems and ebooks in download format. Of interest to Green Door readers will be (UNDER)WORLD –a free ebook by Martin Burke http://delphicgent.wordpress.com/ An interesting if somewhat idiosyncratic site describing itself as blog/journal/forum –a mix of material from the speculative to the quotable –open to submissions