Poetry
aardvarchaeology | April 16, 2009
Högby near Mjölby in Ãstergötland is a magical place because of a serious lack of historical sensitivity. In 1876 (which is really late as these things go in Sweden) the locals demolished their little 12th century church and built a new bigger one a mile to the south. This meant that the parish centre of a millennium or so became a backwater and has not been built over later. It's completely rural, abutting a farm's back yard, very quiet. All that remains of the church is the churchyard wall and one of Ãstergötland's finest rune stones that was taken out of the sacristy wall. Some fine…
jlynch | April 13, 2009Seamus Heaney, Irish poet and Nobel Prize winner is 70 today. To celebrate here is his poem "Strange Fruit," one of a series of poems about bog-bodies.
Here is the girl's head like an exhumed gourd.
Oval-faced, prune-skinned, prune-stones for teeth.
They unswaddled the wet fern of her hair
And made an exhibition of its coil,
Let the air at her leathery beauty.
Pash of tallow, perishable treasure:
Her broken nose is dark as a turf clod,
Her eyeholes blank as pools in the old workings.
Diodorus Siculus confessed
His gradual ease with the likes of this:
Murdered, forgotten,…
aardvarchaeology | March 27, 2009
Spring's finally reached Stockholm! To celebrate, here's a song by one of the city's finest folk singers, Stefan Sundström, off of his 1992 album Happy Hour Viser, "Happy Hour Songs". I translate:
Spring Samba
By Stefan Sundström
One morning when he awoke spring was already here
He was bleary, tired and hung over, pretty bedraggled
She got in through the window like a crazy samba in April
And took him right there, no ifs ands or buts
She danced around the room like a stoned tornado
Like a fairy there to wake the mountain trolls
And she ran up to the window and yelled "Our time is now!"
And…
aardvarchaeology | March 26, 2009
The Mama Mia movie has revitalised interest in Swedish 70s pop giants ABBA. The other day I heard 10-y-o Junior's school choir perform "As Good As New". 5-y-o Juniorette and her pals at daycare sing garbled versions of all the hits, such as "Oo-nay-boo" ("Voulez-Vous").
I grew up with ABBA and I'm still a big fan. But I haven't listened systematically through their oeuvre, haven't really paid much attention to the lyrics as I do when I encounter new music. Looking at "Voulez-Vous", the title track of the band's sixth 1979 album, I found something funny.
"Voulez-Vous" is a rousing disco tune…
bioephemera | February 23, 2009
"On Divination by Birds"
I don't need that black
wind of crows kicking up from flax to tell
heavy weather coming, white days to drop
barricades across the interstate,
against two hundred miles of trackless white.
(The crows so obvious then against the miles
of trackless white!) More tricky the magpies
flicker and croak at the sunken carcass
of a roadkill deer, raveling with beaks
the rubbery guts, picking gravel
from scant meat: there must be in their turn-taking
some pattern, some elegant design
beyond need, something in the raw trouble
of jays, the ragged braying geese flown south.
I gaze…
bioephemera | February 14, 2009I look back over my life.
I try to find analogies.
There are none.
I have longed for people before, I have loved people before.
Not like this.
It was not this.
Give me a world, you have taken the world I was.
--from "Tag" by Anne Carson
read the whole poem at the New Yorker
jlynch | January 15, 2009
There are sizable numbers of Neotropical cormorants (Phalacrocorax olivaceus) that hang around the lakes near where I live here in Tempe. As I drove home this evening a flight of about ten of them were moving from one of the lakes westwards to another nearby lake. That sparked the posting of a poem.
Children imitating cormorants
Children imitating cormorants are even more wonderful than cormorants.
Kobayashi Issa / translated by Robert Hass
<img src>
jlynch | January 11, 2009
From seeing the bars, his seeing is so exhausted that it no longer holds anything anymore. To him the world is bars, a hundred thousand bars, and behind the bars, nothing.
The lithe swinging of that rhythmical easy stride which circles down to the tiniest hub is like a dance of energy around a point in which a great will stands stunned and numb.
Only at times the curtains of the pupil rise without a sound . . . then a shape enters, slips though the tightened silence of the shoulders, reaches the heart, and dies.
Rainer Maria Rilke
(translation by Robert Bly)
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jlynch | January 4, 2009John Wilkins has reminded me of Philip Larkin's poem Aubade:
I work all day, and get half-drunk at night. Waking at four to soundless dark, I stare. In time the curtain-edges will grow light. Till then I see what's really always there: Unresting death, a whole day nearer now, Making all thought impossible but how And where and when I shall myself die.
Wander over to John's place to read the rest of the poem which strangely works well with my first post today.
bioephemera | December 19, 2008Apparently Winston Churchill was not the greatest poet at 15 (but then, who is? Keats churned out some horrible clunkers[1] when young). In this month's BMJ, Angus Nicholl and colleagues call our attention to Churchill's classically influenced poem "The Influenza". (No, it's not actually called "Ode to Flu" - but it might be cooler if it was).
Nicholl and colleagues give Churchill credit for accurately reflecting the geography and seasonality of the 1890-1 Russian flu pandemic. Churchill's teachers at Harrow School gave him a prize. I give him a big eye-roll, and that's generous ("And now…
jlynch | December 12, 2008
AGRIPPA (A Book of The Dead) by William Gibson
I hesitated before untying the bow that bound this book together.
A black book: ALBUMS CA. AGRIPPA Order Extra Leaves By Letter and Name
A Kodak album of time-burned black construction paper
The string he tied Has been unravelled by years and the dry weather of trunks Like a lady's shoestring from the First World War Its metal ferrules eaten by oxygen Until they resemble cigarette-ash
Inside the cover he inscribed something in soft graphite Now lost Then his name W.F. Gibson Jr. and something, comma…
aardvarchaeology | October 17, 2008
I worry about of Montreal's musical motor, pop genius Kevin Barnes. He first got records out in 1997-98, when he was an elegantly naivistic singer of sad love songs. Then he shot like a lysergic rocket straight into Pepperland with four beatlesque albums in 1999-2004. On his 2005 album he suddenly said goodbye to his old band members, returned to confessional mode and sang the praises of married life and parenthood in Norway of all places. And two other new themes appeared: 80s-style electronica and deep depression. That's where he still is.
With his recent album, Skeletal Lamping, Barnes…
aardvarchaeology | October 6, 2008Two of my favourite song writers have revealed themselves as astronomy nerds in love songs.
Frank Black in "Sir Rockaby" (1994):
How many stars girl
Can you both count
And then classify?
I'm standing here in this big swirl
Singing this lullaby
Robert Schneider of the Apples in Stereo in "7 Stars" (2007):
Seven stars in the sky
You're feeling sociable
Silver stars in your eyes
You feel emotional
And you don't even know my name
And I know every constellation
aardvarchaeology | October 5, 2008Extreme Tracking keeps a list of the most popular search terms that direct readers to this blog. Read in order from the most popular one down, they form the following quatrains.
Aardvarchaeology nudity the Martin Rundkvist
Chinese lyrics, molluscum and incest
Sweden archaeology Blidmo Roger
Lamprey contagiosum -- what pop, Swedish emo
Nude scintillating scotoma metal
Old humans are naked girls
For child circumcision blog review
Viking Scandinavian Mucha Medieval
aardvarchaeology | September 27, 2008
For decades, Stockholm has been the turf of photocopy artist Renate Bauer. She paints too, but her main mode of expression is hand-written prose-poetic screeds covering every square centimeter of the paper. These she photocopies and fixes with sticky tape to notice boards, bus stops and other convenient surfaces all around the Swedish capital, as a kind of analog local blog. I pocketed an entry dated Friday near the NW corner of the Humlegården park yesterday. Here are two excerpts, translated by yours truly.
"26/9 '08. You can really tell that the Minister of Culture in Sweden is a talent-…
grrlscientist | September 26, 2008tags: Wood Duck, Aix sponsa, birds, poetry, The Peace of Wild Things, Wendell Berry
Abstract.
Male Wood Duck, Aix sponsa.
Image: John Del Rio [larger view].
This has been a difficult and frightening week, and I admit I was especially terrified to learn that my bank failed and was seized by the SEC last night -- how am I going to pay rent this month?? -- and I've wondered if we all would make it to Friday without the entire nation ending up hungry and homeless. But I am deplaning in Seattle at this moment, and getting ready to spend the weekend with my bird pals and my university pals, as…
jlynch | August 24, 2008
The Stoat
Walking in the warmest afternoon this year has yielded yet, through slopes of whin that made the shadows luminous, and filled the slow air with its fragrance, we went down a narrow track, stone-littered, under trees which with new leaf and opening bud contrived to offer a green commentary on light; and as we wondered silent, stone by stone, on lavish spring, a sudden volley broke, a squealing terror ripped through twig and briar, as a small rabbit pawing at the air and stilting quickly thrust full into view, clenched on its rump a…
jlynch | August 14, 2008
Like a desert flower waiting for rain, like a river-bank thirsting for the touch of pitchers, like the dawn longing for light; and like a house, like a house in ruins for want of a woman - the exhausted ones of our times need a moment to breathe, need a moment to sleep, in the arms of peace, in the arms of peace.
Like a Desert Flower / Parween Faiz Zadah Malaal
jlynch | August 9, 2008I haven't posted poetry in nearly three months, so spurred on by the news that the noted Palestinian poet Mahmoud Darwish has died today following heart surgery, I think I need to start doing so again (at least semi-regularly). The AFP story notes that Darwish had survived two previous heart surgeries, with the last one in 1998 prompting him to write:
"I have defeated you, death/ All the beautiful arts have defeated you/ The songs of Mesopotamia, the obelisks of Egypt, the carved tombs of the pharaohs on the altar have defeated you, and you are vanquished."
On the value of poetry, he wrote…
bioephemera | July 9, 2008"Sonnet: To Science"
words by Edgar Allan Poe
song by Alex Colwell
video by Jeff Burns
From oilcanpress
I love the pairing of Poe's sonnet, which basically accuses Science of destroying the poetic mysteries that make life meaningful, with the techno-optimistic nostalgia of early films glorifying science and technology. Yummy!
Poe had a curious relationship with science. Despite the accusatory tone of his poem, Poe was fairly well-versed in contemporary scientific theory, with a solid grasp of astronomy in particular. Poe even wrote a small book called Eureka (1848) about his early,…