Of brick and bric-a-brac

One of the Scots poets honoured by Edinburgh's Mystery Paper Sculptor was Edwin Morgan, a Glaswegian.  Having been born there, taken his degree and taught there, he became Glasgow's first Poet Laureate in 1999. He died last year, aged 90. Here's the first of his “Glasgow” sonnets, whose crammed consonants create a fantastic staccato effect. It's depressing, as one might expect a poem about Glasgow to be, but it's so clever and so almost painterly (a Scottish Vermeer might have painted it) that it's hard not to find beauty in it. 

A mean wind wanders through the backcourt trash.
Hackles on puddles rise, old mattresses
puff briefly and subside. Play-fortresses
of brick and bric-a-brac spill out some ash.
Four storeys have no windows left to smash,
but the fifth a chipped sill buttresses
mother and daughter the last mistresses
of that black block condemned to stand, not crash.
Around them the cracks deepen, the rats crawl.
The kettle whimpers on a crazy hob.
Roses of mould grow from ceiling to wall.
The man lies late since he has lost his job,
smokes on one elbow, letting his coughs fall
thinly into an air too poor to rob.

Ill conceived, poorly written

This was the judgment of a reader at Knopf of a manuscript called “The Bell Jar,” submitted by one Sylvia Plath.

She's not the only writer of note to have received damning rejections from publishers early on. Sometimes early work might be bad, but more often it seems a case of painful subjectivity of judgment, or of publishers failing to recognise genius when it comes across their desk. It also draws attention to the difference between what's sellable and what's (eventually) great. The spirit and the machinery of literature are often at odds.

Here's a bunch more rejection letters at The Atlantic, including Vladimir Nabokov, Gertrude Stein, and Jack Kerouac.

Glory be to God for yellow fruit

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Bananas are back! We are celebrating their return with gusto. Also the mangos have arrived from their northern climes, sweet and succulent, smelling of paradise. But king among the yellow fruits is lemon. My favourite thing at the moment is pasta with lemon, chilli and garlic - unbelievably good. Lemon with thyme on chicken or potatoes works a treat, and lemon desserts beat chocolate hands down in my book. I can't sufficiently rhapsodise this fruit. But Pablo Neruda could. Here's his mouth-puckeringly exquisite poem “A Lemon.”

Out of lemon flowers
loosed
on the moonlight, love's
lashed and insatiable
essences,
sodden with fragrance,
the lemon tree's yellow
emerges,
the lemons
move down
from the tree's planetarium

Delicate merchandise!
The harbors are big with it -
bazaars
for the light and the
barbarous gold.
We open
the halves
of a miracle,
and a clotting of acids
brims
into the starry
divisions:
creation's
original juices,
irreducible, changeless,
alive:
so the freshness lives on
in a lemon,
in the sweet-smelling house of the rind,
the proportions, arcane and acerb.

Cutting the lemon
the knife
leaves a little cathedral:
alcoves unguessed by the eye
that open acidulous glass
to the light; topazes
riding the droplets,
altars,
aromatic facades.

So, while the hand
holds the cut of the lemon,
half a world
on a trencher,
the gold of the universe
wells
to your touch:
a cup yellow
with miracles,
a breast and a nipple
perfuming the earth;
a flashing made fruitage,
the diminutive fire of a planet.

From hands of falsehood

In Shakespeare's Sonnet 48 he frets over the freedom of his beloved (the unnamed Youth) to come and go, to be stolen by another because he can't be kept under lock and key the way possessions can. It's a striking expression of love taking the form of jealous fear.

It's about a person, but as I read these lines I can't help but think of Shakespeare's work as the lost treasure. Because he couldn't lock it up, nothing prevents “vulgar thieves” (hello Oxfordians) from preying on this prize so dear.

How careful was I when I took my way,
Each trifle under truest bars to thrust,
That to my use it might unused stay
From hands of falsehood, in sure wards of trust!
But thou, to whom my jewels trifles are,
Most worthy comfort, now my greatest grief,
Thou best of dearest, and mine only care,
Art left the prey of every vulgar thief.
Thee have I not locked up in any chest,
Save where thou art not, though I feel thou art,
Within the gentle closure of my breast,
From whence at pleasure thou mayst come and part;
And even thence thou wilt be stol’n I fear,
For truth proves thievish for a prize so dear.