David Gosselin

May 02, 2023

“Sometimes I desire her,

sometimes she eludes me,

but mostly – we climb stone stairs

together, to gently clasp the stars.”

There is a quality of sublimity to these lines.

“Diving to depths she barely knows” is also pure poetic magic.

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martinmccarthy1956

May 02, 2023

Replying to

David Gosselin

Thank you, David. Coming from you, that means a lot.

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ddouthat09

May 02, 2023

Beyond the concreteness of lover’s bed, love is a thing of lasting spirit — no matter.

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martinmccarthy1956

May 02, 2023

Replying to

ddouthat09

I love the clever use of ‘no matter’ at the end of your sparse but insightful comment.

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ddouthat09

May 02, 2023

Replying to

martinmccarthy1956

I thought that was what you had in mind all along

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martinmccarthy1956

May 02, 2023

Replying to

ddouthat09

You are certainly correct in saying that. But I have written about love, desire and the erotic elements in the human condition for a long while now, and few publishers (in my experience) want to touch such topics. They seem to regard them as ‘out of fashion’, even though they contain a sense of the timelessness that true poetry needs in order for it to endure and be of use to the human spirit. Luckily we have David who understands the situation and does his best to redress it.

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ddouthat09

May 02, 2023

Replying to

martinmccarthy1956

Modern Materialists, denying any spiritual aspect of physical intimacy, are almost compelled to find it meaningless and tedious. Eventually, this leads to infidelity and/or decadence. No wonder editors of modern bent shy away. It looks to them like a dead end.

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martinmccarthy1956

May 02, 2023

Replying to

ddouthat09

Materialists wanting to deny the ‘spiritual aspect to physical intimacy’ is the point exactly! And very well put.

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ddouthat09

May 02, 2023

Replying to

martinmccarthy1956

So, as far as you and David and I are concerned, those Materialists are people of No Matter

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jm6783685

May 02, 2023

I like particularly the last line of the first poem. But then I would, wouldn’t I?

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martinmccarthy1956

May 02, 2023

Replying to

jm6783685

Thank you, John. Why the last line of the first poem? Would you explain that to me? It’s quite a mysterious comment.

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jm6783685

May 02, 2023

Replying to

martinmccarthy1956

It’s meant to be.

No. That aside, it’s a clever line, Martin, and I like a certain amount of cleverness. (Providing it’s not overdone.)

It’s also oxymoronic. Meaning: she hardly knows, or knows intimately.

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martinmccarthy1956

May 02, 2023

Replying to

jm6783685

Oh, I do like that! I knew there was something very clever behind it.

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martinmccarthy1956

May 02, 2023

It’s a great privilege to be published once again by The Chained Muse. If anybody has a comment, a question or a suggestion, I would love to hear it.

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Michael R. Burch

May 02, 2023

Replying to

martinmccarthy1956

Martin, I like all three poems. They’re written in modern English, yet they have a timeless quality. The third poem reminds me, for some reason, of lovers at the time of Gilgamesh climbing the steps of a Ziggurat to gaze at the stars. I’m not sure why, perhaps because of one of my own poems, but that kind of suggestion is what first attracted me to poetry as a boy.

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martinmccarthy1956

May 02, 2023

Replying to

Michael R. Burch

Thank you, Michael. Your observation regarding my poems having ‘a timeless quality’ is very interesting and very much appreciated, because a sense of timelessness is exactly what I find lacking in most modern poetry and why it won’t endure in the long run.

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Michael R. Burch

May 02, 2023

Replying to

martinmccarthy1956

We have to keep in mind that the arts have had many fads and that out-of-favor poets and styles have made comebacks. For instance, John Keats was once widely disparaged for being “immature” and too emotional, etc. I think time will correct faddish errors. I ignore all the fads and other nonsense myself. Most literary “rules” and “theories” are laughably illogical. They would make Mr. Spock cock an eyebrow. If I have a working theory, it is that any other theory can be dismissed by finding one masterpiece that violates the theory in question. For instance, the nonsensical idea “no ideas but in things” can be dismissed via the direct statement poems of A. E. Housman and Emily Dickinson, the soliloquies and sonnets of Shakespeare, etc. Poets can be their own worst enemies by buying into such nonsense.

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jm6783685

May 02, 2023

Replying to

Michael R. Burch

They tend to be slogans designed to emphasise one’s differences with other poets. This is all very well. But it surely reduces poetry to the level of politics; and it seems to me that poetry should present a healing balm for all that nonsense, rather than lowering itself to the level of pure egotism. For me poetry should always act as an antidote to mere politics, rather than stirring it up. It’s great strength must always surely lie in wisdom. Memorable wisdom. And in healing division (and divisiveness!) rather than in inciting it.

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Michael R. Burch

May 02, 2023

Replying to

jm6783685

Yes, “make it new” seems to have be code for “make it seem like we’re different from poets of the past.” It’s easier to dismiss other poets than to write something better.

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martinmccarthy1956

May 02, 2023

Replying to

jm6783685

It has become very fashionable in Ireland, among those taking Master Degree courses in Creative Writing, to attack W. B. Yeats and to disparage his poetry – and very spurious reasons are always hauled out to justify this, such as his ‘occultism’, his obsession with sound and craft etc. But the truth is that Yeats set a very high standard for good poetry, and few aspiring young poets are willing (or even encouraged) to do the work necessary to achieve anything remotely like that standard. So the easy thing to do is to disparage Yeats’s work and to call something of a much lower calibre ‘real poetry’. And universities are encouraging this deception because they are making lots of money from these nonsensical courses, where no one learns to write anything remotely wise, or timeless, or worthwhile. Can poetry really survive if universities are working so actively against its true nature? Here’s a little poem I wrote about this recently and Michael published it in The HyperTexts.

Battery Poets

for Prof. P.M.

You were one of the first to venture

forth from your own land,

(your green, free-range world)

in order to create these vast

classrooms of battery poets

penning pale-egg poems

and songs that bear no music,

and no real sense of being lived in;

but are certain to get, at least,

a capital A for being academic–

and maybe, in due course, a Pulitzer

and a steady factory job, like yours.

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martinmccarthy1956

May 02, 2023

Replying to

Michael R. Burch

This is the very point I have just made in reply to John’s comment above. Rather than endeavouring to dismiss the great poets on the basis of one spurious reason or another, why not try to write something better? I think we all know the answer to that!

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jm6783685

May 02, 2023

Replying to

martinmccarthy1956

Increasingly Yeats is the poet I return to most often. Of the four great poets at the beginning of the twentieth century – Yeats, Eliot, Rilke and Valéry – he is the most useful because he remained true to what I call ‘creative ambivalence’ and also wrote in English.

What I call ‘creative ambivalence’ is what Keats called ‘negative capability’ and Coleridge ‘willing suspension of disbelief’ and Socrates ‘aporia’. Eliot lost that necessary freedom in his espousal of Anglo-Catholicism. Valéry in his espousal of atheism. Too great a certainty in anything makes a stone of the heart, to slightly paraphrase Yeats. And poetry should melt hearts. Not deliberately. But as a side-effect of being absolutely honest with oneself. And with one’s own essential lack of certainty on anything.

It is so easy to turn one’s back on tradition, and so avoid all comparison and competition. But in the end that’s a mug’s game. And merely impoverishes one’s work.

I have found it far more enriching to embrace tradition in every way I can. Not just in my work but in my life as well.

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