Ruby Street

... that previous post took me hours, it seems. I don't if it was me (probably), or Blogger (seemed v. slow and/or inconsistent). If it's Blogger, I'm thinking of some alternatives, possibly Australian-made. If it's just me, or my very tired old, cluttered old iMac with OS 10.2.x (how sad is that?), then I'd better start saving up for new hardware and software. OK, I'll get out of your way now.

OK, I was going downstairs to do our prescribed watering for today (we have had water restrictions here in Sydney for quite some time) when Annette asked me, as you do, to rummage up a copy of Shelley’s 'Adonais'. (The only online copy I could find that included the Preface is here at good old Project Gutenberg , along with a heap of other prefatory material before you get the ‘the’ preface.). She’d heard something on the steam radio about Keats and Shelley and the Protestant cemetery in Rome. She’s been to Rome way back but at the time she wouldn’t have been interested in anything Protestant (not now neither, probably, unless I kind of count). Anyway, back on track. She’s been long interested in cemeteries of all kinds (I was being unfair above) and her exhibition last year, The Romance of Death , was a series of photographs taken in Paris cemeteries (see her site or this and this page ).Today, she was interested in Shelley’s preface to the poem rather than the poem itself...

I've been reading in my own disordered way various kinds of sonnets. These are just a fairly random pick of mainly older, what you might call "classic" (if you were doing a mix tape) sonnets - apart from the Brennan, I guess, if you were going to get picky. He's a classic to Australians. I'll post some more "modern" ones late in the day. And maybe an oldie of my own. Samuel Taylor Coleridge - Work without Hope All Nature seems at work. Slugs leave their lair-- The bees are stirring--birds are on the wing-- And Winter slumbering in the open air, Wears on his smiling face a dream of Spring! And I the while, the sole unbusy thing, Nor honey make, nor pair, nor build, nor sing. Yet, well I ken the banks where amaranths blow, Have traced the fount whence streams of nectar flow. Bloom, O ye amaranths! bloom for whom ye may, For me ye bloom not! Glide, rich streams, away! With lips unbrightened, wreathless brow, I stroll: And would you learn the spells that dro...

Perhaps I never recovered ghosts from the Sounds of ravens given air the Sky tended to spill travel guise that Resembled the thirsty travesty game they Hid within groans phones stank of them Crashed to ring simply dishonestly this Metropolis of summer whether, fine!, it's with Whatever assails phases you into False dreams of a rose choosing love if Radar blips canker darker in eyes where a Picture emerges rages as high as if Matter itself paused warding the end off. Never comes goes this cloud-waving into Future, no force worse than time, is

"Perhaps the strongest argument of the book is that poetry should not be seen as either a secondary discourse that needs to be read against the real world of political and economic activity, or as a transcendent work of art that bears no relationship to anything other than itself. Rather, poetry was a means of articulating problems and furthering debate." From Andrew Hadfield's review of Sonnet Sequences and Social Distinction in Renaissance England by Christopher Warley, CUP, in TLS , Feb 3 2006, p.30. The book, apparently, argues that sonnet sequences, popular in Elizabethan and Jacobean times, were a response by poets to their social (ie class) position. Hmm. I'm in a bit of a sonnet 'sequence' myself. In that, I'm writing a damn lot of them. Bend them, shape them, anyway I want them - kind of thing. A class struggle? How knows?

Day by day they are dying as day by opening into yellow into the stream to die living into the green seen through water glass/lumen/split the curve falls onto an imaginary and real table

And how sound changes the heart shave or switch the time beat listen through skin and in terror that something will amiss or change heart through sound beat that skins amiss the switch to time heart

Last week wasn't a good week. Some health isshews. I was a bit attached to machines on-and-off (well, they were attached to me, I wasn't real keen on them). In one case it was like being in a claustrophobic space pod while some noise electronica band was tuning up for half an hour, or someone was drilling for oil inside my head. What fun! I had to have a stiff lemonade after that one. True. Sprite to the rescue. I still don't know if they found oil. All that lies ahead, so to speak. Another kind of interpretation, I suppose.