Tom Leonard RIP
CityCyclingEdinburgh Forum » General Edinburgh
OT: well versed
(161 posts)-
Posted 5 years ago #
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Being a Human Being
Tom Leonardnot to be complicit
not to accept everyone else is silent it must be alrightnot to keep one’s mouth shut to hold onto one’s job
not to accept public language as cover and decoynot to put friends and family before the rest of the world
not to say I am wrong when you know the government is wrongnot to be just a bought behaviour pattern
to accept the moment and fact of choiceI am a human being
and I exista human being
and a citizen of the worldresponsible to that world
—and responsible for that worldPosted 5 years ago # -
Tom, what a man. Quite a fiery drunk after a couple of sherbets. Not as good at holding his drink as Jim Kelman but not as bad as Alasdair Gray when pished.
Tom could annihilate his audience with invective and we loved him.
I was having a quiet drink with my pal Carmel Gilligan from Ballinasloe in the Vicky BarGlasgow in the previous century when Tom and his acolyte took exception to my stripey shirt. The acolyte starts in on me so i recited a very obscure sound poem that Tom wrote called My Name Is Tom that only the acolyte and I had ever read. Tom turns to Gilly but she only had to speak in her west Ireland drawl and Tom was a puppy who immediately recited The Winding Sheet by James Clarence Mangan ( pauper poet from 19th century Ireland).
An enjoyable evening ensued.
Part of my youth has now gone. Actually quite emotional. I guess this will go on.
Posted 5 years ago # -
Oops, not like me to tell the same story twice.
Efturryd geenuz iz speel
Iboot whit wiz right
Nwhut wiz rang
Boot this nthat
Nthi Nix thingA sayzty thi bloke
Nwhut Izzit Yi caw
Yir Joab JimmyAm a liaison co-ordinator
Hi sayz oh good ah sayz
A liaison co-ordinatorJist whut this erria needs
Whut way aw thi unimploymint
Inaw thi bevvyin
Nthi boayz runnin amock
Nthi hoosis Fawnty bits
Nthi wummin n tranquilisers
It last thiv sent us
A liaison co-ordinatorSumdy Wia degree
In f@&£ knows whut
Getn peyd fur no known
Whit the f@&£ ti day way itPredictive text did not like
Posted 5 years ago # -
Another poet gone - Donald Campbell. Anyway, this seemed forum-adjacent:
Betrayal in Morninside
Embro my ain, ye are aye meant
tae be a city o middle-class douceness
blue-nosed mediocrity
bourgeois obtusenessbut
(listen tae what I’m tellin ye!)
The ither nicht
in the Morninside chippie
I was confrontit by nae fewer than ten
o the reuchest and the teuchest
o yer haurdest-haurd haurd men
– and (O Gode!) hou I wished I was in Glasgow!Posted 5 years ago # -
Discovering a poet I have never read who has just died is always a weird one - Australia's Les Murray. Clearly something to rectify because this is glorious!
THE DREAM OF WEARING SHORTS FOREVER
by Les Murray
To go home and wear shorts forever
in the enormous paddocks, in that warm climate,
adding a sweater when winter soaks the grass,
to camp out along the river bends
for good, wearing shorts, with a pocketknife,
a fishing line and matches,or there where the hills are all down, below the plain,
to sit around in shorts at evening
on the plank verandah -If the cardinal points of costume
are Robes, Tat, Rig and Scunge,
where are shorts in this compass?They are never Robes
as other bareleg outfits have been:
the toga, the kilt, the lava-lava
the Mahatma's cotton dhoti;archbishops and field marshals
at their ceremonies never wear shorts.
The very word
means underpants in North America.Shorts can be Tat,
Land-Rovering bush-environmental tat,
socio-political ripped-and-metal-stapled tat,
solidarity-with-the-Third World tat tvam asi,likewise track-and-field shorts worn to parties
and the further humid, modelling negligee
of the Kingdom of Flaunt,
that unchallenged aristocracy.More plainly climatic, shorts
are farmers' rig, leathery with salt and bonemeal;
are sailors' and branch bankers' rig,
the crisp golfing style
of our youngest male National Costume.Most loosely, they are Scunge,
ancient Bengal bloomers or moth-eaten hot pants
worn with a former shirt,
feet, beach sand, hair
and a paucity of signals.Scunge, which is real negligee
housework in a swimsuit, pyjamas worn all day,
is holiday, is freedom from ambition.
Scunge makes you invisible
to the world and yourself.The entropy of costume,
scunge can get you conquered by more vigorous cultures
and help you notice it less.To be or to become
is a serious question posed by a work-shorts counter
with its pressed stack, bulk khaki and blue,
reading Yakka or King Gee, crisp with steely warehouse odour.Satisfied ambition, defeat, true unconcern,
the wish and the knack of self-forgetfulness
all fall within the scunge ambit
wearing board shorts of similar;
it is a kind of weightlessness.Unlike public nakedness, which in Westerners
is deeply circumstantial, relaxed as exam time,
artless and equal as the corsetry of a hussar regiment,shorts and their plain like
are an angelic nudity,
spirituality with pockets!
A double updraft as you drop from branch to pool!Ideal for getting served last
in shops of the temperate zone
they are also ideal for going home, into space,
into time, to farm the mind's Sabine acres
for product and subsistence.Now that everyone who yearned to wear long pants
has essentially achieved them,
long pants, which have themselves been underwear
repeatedly, and underground more than once,
it is time perhaps to cherish the culture of shorts,to moderate grim vigour
with the knobble of bare knees,
to cool bareknuckle feet in inland water,
slapping flies with a book on solar wind
or a patient bare hand, beneath the cadjiput trees,to be walking meditatively
among green timber, through the grassy forest
towards a calm sea
and looking across to more of that great island
and the further tropics.Posted 5 years ago # -
He was a big guy. Scottish connections I think, saw him on stage and in audiences back in the day.
If Walcott is still with us that leaves him on his own as greatest living poet in English Language.
If Walcott gone then it is Muldoon
Posted 5 years ago # -
Something very antipodean about Murray. He conjures up utes and verandas and scrubby coarse grass.
The Quality of Sprawl
Sprawl is the quality
of the man who cut down his Rolls-Royce
into a farm utility truck, and sprawl
is what the company lacked when it made repeated efforts
to buy the vehicle back and repair its image.Sprawl is doing your farming by aeroplane, roughly,
or driving a hitchhiker that extra hundred miles home.
It is the rococo of being your own still centre.
It is never lighting cigars with ten-dollar notes:
that’s idiot ostentation and murder of starving people.
Nor can it be bought with the ash of million-dollar deeds.Sprawl lengthens the legs; it trains greyhounds on liver and beer.
Sprawl almost never says Why not? With palms comically raised
nor can it be dressed for, not even in running shoes worn
with mink and a nose ring. That is Society. That’s Style.
Sprawl is more like the thirteenth banana in a dozen
or anyway the fourteenth.Sprawl is Hank Stamper in Never Give an Inch
bisecting an obstructive official’s desk with a chainsaw.
Not harming the official. Sprawl is never brutal
though it’s often intransigent. Sprawl is never Simon de Montfort
at a town-storming: Kill them all! God will know his own.
Knowing the man’s name this was said to might be sprawl.Sprawl occurs in art. The fifteenth to twenty-first
lines in a sonnet, for example. And in certain paintings;
I have sprawl enough to have forgotton which paintings.
Turner’s glorious Burning of the Houses of Parliament
comes to mind, a doubling bannered triumph of sprawl –
except, he didn’t fire them.Sprawl gets up the nose of many kinds of people
(every kind that comes in kinds) whose futures don’t include it.
some decry it as criminal presumption, silken-robed Pope Alexander
dividing the new world between Spain and Portugal.
If he smiled in petto afterwards, perhaps the thing did have sprawl.Sprawl is really classless, though. It’s John Christopher Frederick Murray
asleep in his neighbours‘ best bed in spurs and oilskins
but not having thrown up:
sprawl is never Calum who, drunk, along the hallways of our House,
reinvented the Festoon. Rather
it’s Beatrice Miles going twelve hundred ditto in a taxi,
No Lewd Advances, No Hitting Animals, No Speeding,
on the proceeds of her two-bob-a-sonnet Shakespeare readings.
An image of my country. And would that it were more so.No, sprawl is full-gloss murals on a council-house wall.
Sprawl leans on things. It is loose-limbed in its mind.
Reprimanded and dismissed
it listens with a grin and one boot up on the rail
of possibility. It may have to leave the Earth.
Being roughly Christian, it scratches the other cheek
and thinks it unlikely. Though people have been shot for sprawl.Posted 5 years ago # -
The Broad Bean Sermon
Beanstalks, in any breeze, are a slack church parade
without belief, saying trespass against us in unison,
recruits in mint Air Force dacron, with unbuttoned leaves.Upright with water like men, square in stem-section
they grow to great lengths, drink rain, keel over all ways,
kink down and grow up afresh, with proffered new greenstuff.Above the cat-and-mouse floor of a thin bean forest
snails hang rapt in their food, ants hurry through several dimensions:
spiders tense and sag like little black flags in their cordage.Going out to pick beans with the sun high as fence-tops, you find
plenty, and fetch them. An hour or a cloud later
you find shirtfulls more. At every hour of daylightappear more than you missed: ripe, knobbly ones, freshy-sided,
thin-straight, thin-crescent, frown-shaped, bird-shouldered, boat-keeled ones,
beans knuckled and single-bulged, minute green dolphins at suck,beans upright like lecturing, outstretched like blessing fingers
in the incident light, and more still, oblique to your notice
that the noon glare or cloud-light or afternoon slants will uncovertill you ask yourself Could I have overlooked so many, or
do they form in an hour? unfolding into reality
like templates for subtly broad grins, like unique caught expressions,like edible meanings, each sealed around with a string
and affixed to its moment, an unceasing colloquial assembly,
the portly, the stiff, anf those lolling in pointed green slippers ...Wondering who’ll take the spare bagfulls, you grin with happiness
– it is your health – you vow to pick them all
even the last few, weeks off yet, misshapen as toes.Posted 5 years ago # -
Heard him doing sprawl back in the day
Posted 5 years ago # -
His voice on Front Row just now reading Shorts.
Posted 5 years ago # -
Walcott dead. He was knighted and won Nobel.
Les more republican outsider so would I presume turn down knighthood. Was mentioned for Nobel.
Means Muldoon has it.
Posted 5 years ago # -
I used to work with a guy who flatly declared that he knew which was the best painting in the world and I used to wonder where such confidence could come from in one human life.
I think we should have a CCE poetry thread this summer. New works tangentially themed on bicycles. No secret that @gembo is a poet of some renown. We must have others.
Posted 5 years ago # -
Verse versus verse? She
who lays down with fleas
may be bit by doggerel.Posted 5 years ago # -
I saw Paul Muldoon for free in Golden Hare plus free coffee and free croissant plus Paul read some Johnny Cash too.
Top trump that
Las Meninas is the best painting BTW. F'Godssakes Foucault write an entire book about it.
The Best Poetry Garden is Little Sparta at Dunsyre. Don't be fooled by ones that only open once a year down Dumfries way even if they use the word Cosmic
THe scene in Gregory's Girl where they lie down to dance and Forsyth swings the camera vertical but they don't fall off is one of the sweetest scenes in cinema.
In Cumbernauld related mirth, the photoshop of David Bowie in the Cumbernauld shopping centre (see our own David Bowie thread) is the greatest photoshop ever.
All of this can easily be revised over beer. This is what loosens relativists up and allows them to be absolute empiricists (beer)
Posted 5 years ago # -
Is the Cosmic one really a "poetry garden"?
(Really chuffed I have managed to see that one.)
Posted 5 years ago # -
HIGH TREASON
By José Emilio PachecoI do not love my country. Its abstract splendor
is beyond my grasp.
But (although it sounds bad) I would give my life
for ten places in it, for certain people,
seaports, pinewoods, fortresses,
a run-down city, gray, grotesque,
various figures from its history
mountains
(and three or four rivers).Posted 5 years ago # -
Stumbled on this looking for other stuff. Oor ain dear Robert Ferguson's On Seeing a Butterfly in the Street.
Daft gowk, in macaroni dress
Are ye come here to shaw your face,
Bowden wi' pride o' simmer gloss,
To cast a dash at Reikie's cross;
An glowr at mony a twa-legg'd creature,
Flees, braw by art, tho' worms by nature?My first crime thriller will be called 'Worms by Nature'.
Posted 5 years ago # -
Daft gowk, in macaroni dress
Interesting. This must be the same use of macaroni as in Yankee Doodle – stylish, fashionable, indeed proto-dandyish, from the well travelled men in the 18th c. who extravagantly imitated continental fashions and culinary tastes, and thus were said to belong (or possibly claimed membership of) 'the Macaroni Club'. Macaroni were originally small Italian dumplings but later became the name for tubular pasta.
Posted 5 years ago # -
Edwin Morgan, The Coin
We brushed the dirt off, held it to the light.
The obverse showed us Scotland, and the head
of a red deer; the antler-glint had fled
but the fine cut could still be felt. All right:
we turned it over, read easily One Pound,
but then the shock of Latin, like a gloss,
Respublica Scotorum, sent across
such ages as we guessed but never found
at the worn edge where once the date had been
and where as many fingers had gripped hard
as hopes their silent race had lost or gained.
The marshy scurf crept up to our machine,
sucked at our boots. Yet nothing seemed ill-starred.
And least of all the realm the coin contained.Posted 4 years ago # -
i hear no sound in your house
silence in the empty roomsi drown at night in your house
pretending to swim, pretending to swim
in your housePosted 4 years ago # -
From a colleague:
Map-based haiku generator!
https://satellitestud.io/osm-haiku/app/#17/55.94097/-3.17936
And an explanation of how https://satellitestud.io/blog/post/openstreetmap-haiku/
ETA aw, doesn't seem to work away from Edinburgh and gets a bit repetitive after a while. Still!
Posted 4 years ago # -
Auto-haiku for our house;
Feeling good in City of Edinburgh
Blades of grass
Flies and maggotsClearly spring is here and clearly I didn't bury my last victim deep enough.
Posted 4 years ago # -
@IWRATS would you and Madame IWRATS (or anyone else who is bilingual enough) be interested in (I quote) "a bilingual English/French show around the delightful poetry of Jacques Prevert and Boris Vian" entitled "Si les poetes etaient moins betes (if poets were less stupid)"?
(Apologies for the complete lack of accents in that.)It is being done by a French acquaintance & her friends and that's really all I know.
Posted 4 years ago # -
Boris Vian is the author of J'irai cracher sur vos tombes, 'I Spit On Your Grave'.
But aye, potentially. Where and when?
Posted 4 years ago # -
I don't know. "Two weeks time" says her facebook post. I saw it and thought of you, to coin a phrase.
Posted 4 years ago # -
THEY GATHER
Where crowds most densely cluster
Their freedom sought in droves
The price of their attendance
Greater than they may supposeBy heat and light, they gather
Drawn to meet again
To experience together
What they should, alone, containPosted 4 years ago # -
Nice metre
Did the I will spit on your grave event get Covidded?
Posted 4 years ago # -
Wild Geese
You do not have to be good.
You do not have to walk on your knees
for a hundred miles through the desert, repenting.
You only have to let the soft animal of your body
love what it loves.
Tell me about despair, yours, and I will tell you mine.
Meanwhile the world goes on.
Meanwhile the sun and the clear pebbles of the rain
are moving across the landscapes,
over the prairies and the deep trees,
the mountains and the rivers.
Meanwhile the wild geese, high in the clean blue air,
are heading home again.
Whoever you are, no matter how lonely,
the world offers itself to your imagination,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and exciting—
over and over announcing your place
in the family of things.
- Mary Oliver
Posted 4 years ago # -
Posted 4 years ago #
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