Arty Farty Friday ~ Burns Night

Robert ("Rabbie") Burns born in Scotland on 25 January 1759 - 260 years ago today. Burns wasn't a painter but he qualifies for the "arty farty" banner for his poetry and quirky style.

Most people will recognise a few of Burns' poems: Auld Lang Syne (a New Year favourite when put to music); My Love is Like a Red Red Rose, for instance.

Others need a wee bit of translation - To a Mouse is one of these. The poem is available at Wikipedia with "a modern translation".
The original last two verses go like this

But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best-laid schemes o’ mice an’ men,
Gang aft a-gley,
An’ lea’e us nought but grief an’ pain,
For promis’d joy.

Still thou are blest, compared wi’ me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But Och! I backward cast my e’e,
On prospects drear!
An’ forward, tho’ I canna see,
I guess an’ fear!


I like this summary explanation of the poem from Schmoop

The speaker is plowing a field and accidentally turns up a mouse's nest. The mouse is shivering and terrified. The man stops his work to try to comfort the mouse.

He tells her to relax. He didn't mean to break into her nest. But then the speaker starts thinking more about it—the mouse is, after all, pretty justified in being freaked out. Mice should be scared of humans. We set traps for them, we set cats after them, and we plow up their winter nests. The speaker apologizes on behalf of all humankind. He says that the mouse might steal little bits of food from human farms, but who cares? That one little mouse doesn't eat much. And now her little winter house is all in a ruin. He imagines the mouse planning ahead carefully for the winter—she worked so hard to make her nice little nest, and then, BOOM. The plow goes right over it.

But hey, says the speaker—that's life. Whether you're a mouse or a man, your plans—however well-laid—often get messed up. And after all, the mouse has it easy, compared to a human. Mice live in the present moment, while humans look to the past with the regret and to the future with fear. Lucky mouse.

Also notable:
John Steinbeck took the title of his 1937 novel Of Mice and Men from a line contained in the penultimate stanza: "The best laid schemes o' mice an' men / Gang aft agley" (often paraphrased in English as "The best-laid plans of mice and men / Go oft awry").

In Douglas Adams's Hitchhikers Guide to the Galaxy series, mice are the physical protrusions into our dimension of a race of hyperintelligent pan-dimensional beings who commissioned construction of the Earth to find the Question to the Ultimate Answer of Life, the Universe, and Everything. When their plans go wrong they lament that "the best laid plans of mice" don't always work out.

At the Burns Birthplace Museum in Scotland, there stands a piece of arty fartyness in tribute to the "Mouse" poem:

Fast-forward two and a quarter centuries: Alloway, Scotland in 2010. The Robert Burns Birthplace Museum was under construction, almost completed. Its caretaker, the National Trust for Scotland, had launched a competition to find an artist who could create a public work of art, to celebrate the poet, that would be situated on the walkway of the new museum. The contemporary Scottish sculptor Kenny Hunter received the commission; he had already established his name around the globe with large works of animals and people and skeletons that have been labeled ‘anti-monuments.’ The artist has noted his sculptures “look as if they have just popped out of a machine or a Kellogg’s cornflake packet—yet they are monumentalised and subversive.” For the winning work Hunter chose to pay homage to none other than Burns’s mouse, a seven-foot bronze that he titled Monument to a Mouse. In an interview, he said, shortly after hearing his proposal had been selected “my cat deposited a dead field mouse outside my door just before bedtime. It’s a common thing for cats to do of course, but the mouse was in just the right pose and unusually for my cat she had left it perfectly intact. So I put it in the freezer and took it to the studio in the morning to begin work on the model. It helped tremendously in developing the form that my monumental mouse would take.”
https://mouseinterrupted.wordpress.com/tag/kenny-hunter/

I've always enjoyed reading another of Burns' poems:
A Man's A Man For A' That.
Last verse:

Then let us pray that come it may,
(As come it will for a' that,)
That Sense and Worth, o'er a' the earth,
Shall bear the gree, an' a' that.
For a' that, an' a' that,
It's coming yet for a' that,
That Man to Man, the world o'er,
Shall brothers be for a' that.

Being translated:

Then let us pray that come it may
(As come it will for a' that)
That Sense and Worth over all the earth
Shall take the prize and all that!
For all that, and all that,
It is coming yet for all that,
That man to man the world over
Shall brothers be for all that.

I fear that the prediction in those final lines will still, even in 2019, be a long time coming. But ten out of ten to Rabbie Burns for his optimism!


Finally, recalling Robert Burns' wise, but unlikely to be granted, plea...:

Poetry & War

I notice that today, 24 July, was the birthday of
Robert Graves (24 July 1895 – 7 December 1985), an English poet, historical novelist, critic, and classicist.

[Robert Graves] developed an early reputation as a war poet and was one of the first to write realistic poems about the experience of front line conflict. In later years, he omitted his war poems from his collections, on the grounds that they were too obviously "part of the war poetry boom." At the Battle of the Somme, he was so badly wounded by a shell-fragment through the lung that he was expected to die and was officially reported as having died of wounds. He gradually recovered and, apart from a brief spell back in France, spent the remainder of the war in England.

Graves, however, didn't remain one of the better known World War 1 poets such as Rupert Brooke, Wilfred Owen, or Siegfried Sassoon (his close friend).

The Poets of World War 1 formed part of our high school syllabus in English Literature - back in the 1950s. I have faded memories of some of their works and histories. Looking back, it seems like a rather depressing study for young women to have undertaken, but as World War 2 was still fresh in memories of both students and teachers - and even World War 1 was recalled by some of the older ladies teaching us, I suppose it was no bad thing that the horrors of war be etched deeply into our subconscious minds.

Here are three of Robert Graves' war poems.

Hate Not - Fear Not

Kill if you must, but never hate:
Man is but grass and hate is blight,
The sun will scorch you soon or late,
Die wholesome then, since you must fight.

Hate is a fear, and fear is rot
That cankers root and fruit alike,
Fight cleanly then, hate not, fear not,
Strike with no madness when you strike.

Fever and fear distract the world,
But calm be you though madmen shout,
Through blazing fires of battle hurled,
Hate not, strike, fear not, stare Death out!



Give Us Rain

'Give us Rain, Rain,' said the bean and the pea,
'Not so much Sun,
Not so much Sun.'
But the Sun smiles bravely and encouragingly,
And no rain falls and no waters run.

'Give us Peace, Peace,' said the peoples oppressed,
'Not so many Flags,
Not so many Flags.'
But the Flags fly and the Drums beat, denying rest,
And the children starve, they shiver in rags.


1915

I’ve watched the Seasons passing slow, so slow,
In the fields between La Bassée and Bethune;
Primroses and the first warm day of Spring,
Red poppy floods of June,
August, and yellowing Autumn, so
To Winter nights knee-deep in mud or snow,
And you’ve been everything.

Dear, you’ve been everything that I most lack
In these soul-deadening trenches — pictures, books,
Music, the quiet of an English wood,
Beautiful comrade-looks,
The narrow, bouldered mountain-track,
The broad, full-bosomed ocean, green and black,
And Peace, and all that’s good.

Music Monday ~ The Poet and Janis

Patricia Spears Jones, African American award-winning poet, born in Arkansas in 1951, has lived most of her adult life in
New York. One of her poems:





Swimming to America—Half-moon Sky

Esther Louise and I were talking about Janis Joplin. We were talking about
how Janis Joplin sang as if she found a pain so wide it wounded her.
She sang loud and harsh. But the wound was big. The wound would not heal.
She sang as if nothing nothing could cauterize that wound.
She sang as if only only she knew the way to heal this wound was to burn.
Daily dousing flames from her mouth. Daily striking matches to her mouth.
She sang as if the only only way she could make her face
remove every trace of plainness was to burn burn burn.
She sang so hard and long and loud she came as close as she could
to the pain of those songs made in boxcars, juke joints
outside vaudeville tents home to deviants degenerates and the generous
family of hustlers, some of them women torched by the freedom of the road.
Oh yes, Esther Louise said, “that white girl can sing the blues.”
Janis sang as if only only she could sweep away dry Texas air and burn
out like a nova leaving traces of wild hair, Indian bracelets all the
way up her arm. Her neck wrapped in layers of beads from Persia,
beads from Navaho land, beads from West Africa.
When I first saw Ntozake Shange, I thought, Janis Joplin.

From Bomb Magazine.

Link to the poet's own website: http://psjones.com/

I felt sure I'd written a post about Janis Joplin, with astrology, but if so it has sunk without trace, wrongly tagged perhaps, in the archives. Janis was mentioned in a post I wrote after husband and I had visited his younger daughter and grand daughter in Austin, Texas, years ago - that one is HERE.

Arty Farty Friday ~ Dorothea Tanning, artist & writer.

Dorothea Tanning, American surrealist painter, print-maker, sculptor, writer, and poet. She was born on this day in 1910, died in 2012, aged 101.

She certainly had a way with words, as well as paint! This sample of her writing from an article/interview HERE:

Now the doors are all open, the air is mother-of-pearl, and you know the way to tame a tiger. It will not elude you today for you have grabbed a brush, you have dipped it almost at random, so high is your rage, into the amalgam of color, formless on a docile palette.

As you drag lines like ropes across one brink of reality after another, annihilating the world you made yesterday and hated today, a new world heaves into sight. Again, the event progresses without the benefit of hours.

The application of color to a support, something to talk about when it’s all over, now holds you in thrall. The act is your accomplice. So are the tools, beakers, bottles, knives, glues, solubles, insolubles, tubes, plasters, cans; there is no end ... (Dorothea Tanning)

I considered this the best presented YouTube video featuring Ms Tanning's work. Titles of her paintings are included, making it easy for interested viewers to easily search for a larger version of any which particularly attracts them.




Extracted from one of the many obituaries available online this from The Telegraph:

Dorothea Tanning was born on August 25 1910 to Swedish immigrants who had made their home at Galesburg, Illinois. At the age of five she developed a gift for weeping while reciting tragic poetry, leading her mother to hope that she might make a career on the stage. Two years later, however, she had made up her mind to become an artist.

In her autobiography she recalled that her devout Lutheran parents had been alarmed by a perverse bohemian streak that first manifested itself when, as a child, she always lusted after the villain in Westerns. Aged 15, despite never having heard of Surrealism, she horrified her family by painting a naked woman with leaves for hair.

She left home at 20 and moved to Chicago where, after dropping out of art school, she worked as an artist’s model, an illustrator, and a marionnettist at the World’s Fair, and claimed to have dated a gangster who was called away and murdered while she waited at the bar.

In 1936 she moved to New York, where she supported herself by working as an illustrator. The same year she visited an exhibition of Fantastic Art, Dada and Surrealism at the Museum of Modern Art: “I thought, Gosh! I can go ahead and do what I’ve always been doing,” she recalled.

In 1939 she travelled to Paris, armed with letters of introduction to several prominent artists, Ernst among them, but found that most had fled the city, which was on the brink of war. After a short spell with her father’s family in neutral Sweden, she returned to New York on the last boat.

After 31 Women, Dorothea Tanning had her first solo exhibition in 1944, at the Julien Levy Gallery in New York. By then she and Ernst were living at Sedona, where they confronted lizards, scorpions and snakes and played host to a bohemian cast of visitors including George Balanchine (for whom she would design ballet sets and costumes), Henri Cartier-Bresson, Marcel Duchamp, Truman Capote and Dylan Thomas.

To escape McCarthy era restrictions, they moved to France in 1957, ultimately settling at Seillans, a hilltop village in Provence, in a house designed by Dorothea. During the 1960s and 1970s her work was exhibited regularly at galleries in America and Europe. It was in France, too, where she “lived a lot in my own language”, that she developed her writing skills as a “way of talking”. She and her husband never discussed art, she claimed — “We just had fun.” Unlike some critics, Ernst always allowed her independence, never referring to her as “my wife” but always as Dorothea Tanning.

After his death she returned, in 1979, to New York. Alongside her writing, and following a stroke in the mid-1990s, she embarked on a series of 12 flower paintings – lush, dark works which were subsequently collected in a book entitled Another Language of Flowers.

Just one example of her painting:

 Palaestra = (in ancient Greece and Rome) a wrestling school or gymnasium.

ASTROLOGY

Born on 25 August 1910 in Galesburg, Illinois. No time of birth known. Chart set for noon.

A scant few points, because lack of birth time leaves rising sign unknown as well as exact Moon position. I suspect her rising sign might light up the whole picture and bring it more into focus.

I do see her writing talent: three planets in Mercury-ruled Virgo, one at the beginning of that sign, one mid-sign and one in the last degrees of the sign: Sun Mars and Mercury respectively. Natal Mercury links to Uranus (planet of the unusual and unexpected) by harmonious trine (120 degrees) which probably explains the drive to surrealism in her painting. She has the generational opposition of Uranus-Neptune, so with personal planet Mercury in trine to Uranus that draws in the Uranus/Neptune eccentricities of dreamlike imagination. Ideally I'd have expected Venus, planet of the arts to have been hooked up to that in some way, but not so. Venus is in Leo - maybe that Venu/Leo flavour harks back to her early indication of possessing some acting talent (mentioned in the clip above).

Natal Moon at noon was at 7 Taurus - ruled by Venus, but I guess (not sure about this) there's an outside chance that Moon could have been in the very last minutes of the last degree of Aries, if her birth time had been extremely early. At noon natal Moon was uncomfortably close to Saturn, which didn't feel right to me, from the impression I've gleaned of this lady.

Underlining, again, her writing talent I'll finish with one of her poems Are You? This opens her poetry collection A Table of Content (2004), and is a.... profound statement about identity and self-reliance. This comes from an obituary in The Guardian.

If an expatriate is, as I believe, someone
who never forgets for an instant
being one,
then, no.
But, if knowing that you always
tote your country around
with you, your roots,
a lump
… that being elsewhere packs a vertigo,
a tightrope side you cannot
pass up, another way
to show
how not to break your pretty neck
falling on skylights:
… then, yes.

Pair of Poems by John Ciardi + A Birthday

I've stumbled across another poet not known to me before: John Ciardi. Some of his poems remind me of Ogden Nash's, others have a tinge of Shel Silverstein. I was not surprised, either , when I noticed that some of his books of poems, especially his children's poems, were illustrated by Edward Gorey, about whom I wrote a post a few years ago see HERE.

Here are a couple of poems by John Ciardi as tasters:





Philosophical Poem

The disease of civilization is not tools, citizen.
Ignorance might be closer to it.
Politics closer. But only Money
Will hit the brass tacks everyone wants to get down to
Squarely on the head.

Above all, I have no case against human nature.
Whatever that is, I like it.
I like mechanics with wrenches,
Taxi drivers' photos on licenses,
Drunks lighting cigarettes.
What the hell else is there to like
After you've kissed your wife and gone to sleep?

I like everything but important people being important.
And academic people being academic.
What I like least is bookkeepers
Spending their human eyes on accounts receivable,
Interest receivable, payment due, balance on hand.
And columns of soldiers marching.

Why Nobody Pets The Lion At The Zoo


The morning that the world began
The Lion growled a growl at Man.

And I suspect the Lion might
(If he'd been closer) have tried a bite.

I think that's as it ought to be
And not as it was taught to me.

I think the Lion has a right
To growl a growl and bite a bite.

And if the Lion bothered Adam,
He should have growled right back at 'im.

The way to treat a Lion right
Is growl for growl and bite for bite.

True, the Lion is better fit
For biting than for being bit.

But if you look him in the eye
You'll find the Lion's rather shy.

He really wants someone to pet him.
The trouble is: his teeth won't let him.

He has a heart of gold beneath
But the Lion just can't trust his teeth.

For any passing reader interested in astrology, Astrotheme has John Ciardi's 12 noon natal chart. He was born on 24 June 1916 in Boston MA.

I found it rather odd to see that he had Sun conjunct Pluto, and Venus conjunct Saturn - all in Cancer. That doesn't seem to fit the atmosphere of his poetry at all. Uranus was at 19 Aquarius in harmonious trine to Mercury in Gemini - there's his quirk!

PS Wishing A VERY HAPPY BIRTHDAY today, to my husband Anyjazz!

Speaking of Lions, as the poet was, husband happens to have Leo Moon and Leo rising to go with his Aries Sun - hot stuff!? I should keep in mind these lines from Mr Ciardi, I guess:
"The way to treat a Lion right
Is growl for growl and bite for bite."

Hamlin Garland ~ Writer, Poet, Radical & Virgoan.

Poking around the net to find a character born around this time of year to investigate, I noticed that a writer, name unfamiliar to me, was born this day, 14 September in 1860 - and what a colourful name he had! Hamlin Garland. Hamlin brings thoughts of the Pied Piper of... and Garland always reminiscent of sweet flowers or...of Judy! Hamlin Garland was a good fit for his Mercury-ruled Virgo Sun - a writer and poet with, according to Wikipedia, an interesting side interest in psychic phenomena: "After moving to Hollywood, California, in 1929, he devoted his remaining years to investigating psychic phenomena, an enthusiasm he first undertook in 1891. In his final book, The Mystery of the Buried Crosses (1939), he tried to defend such phenomena and prove the legitimacy of psychic mediums." Mr Garland died in March 1940.

Hamlin Garland, Prairie Radical
Writings from the 1890s

Preserving the spirit and personal convictions of the Midwest's outspoken native son

"I am a reformer--a radical--a promoter of Democracy..."- Hamlin Garland to Horace Traubel, 13 January 1892

As a self-proclaimed native "son of the middle border" states of Wisconsin, Nebraska, Iowa, Minnesota, and South Dakota, Hamlin Garland wrote short stories, novels, and essays about the harsh realities of farm life. At a time when rural romanticism was in literary vogue, he described conditions for midwestern farmers as they really were and promoted a wide variety of reforms to improve their lives, including women's rights legislation and single-tax reform.

The volume reprints much of Garland's radical fiction and nonfiction from between 1887 and 1894, almost all previously uncollected, including four of his most outspoken stories depicting farm conditions of the time. Fueled by moral outrage and a cry for justice shaped by his own family's hardships in Wisconsin, Iowa, and South Dakota, the radical writing of his early career is filled with compassion and fury.

Seeking to reinvigorate an appreciation and understanding of Garland's centrality in the rise of a post–Civil War radical spirit in American expression, this collection assembles the most vibrant and representative examples of his radical 1890s writings.

One of his poems:

Do you fear the force of the wind,
The slash of the rain?
Go face them and fight them,
Be savage again.
Go hungry and cold like the wolf,
Go wade like the crane:
The palms of your hands will thicken,
The skin of your cheek will tan,
You'll grow ragged and weary and swarthy,
But you'll walk like a man!

HAMLIN GARLAND, OCCASIONAL MINNESOTAN
In the spring of of 1939 I had the pleasure of conversing with Hamlin Garland on the terrace of his home on De Mille Drive, Hollywood. Garland then seemed in good health, a short but stocky man with a white mane of hair and stubby fingers. His garrulousness, his accurate memory for details belonging to another century, and his physical energy belied his seventy-eight years. Our conversation ran naturally to books, to his experiences in the Middle West, to his meetings with western writers like Joseph Kirkland and Edward Eggleston, and to his own ideals as a novelist. He remarked that he could not stomach the fiction of John Steinbeck, nor the work of any writer who limited himself to the evil and ugly aspects of life. To him, the novelist who wrote of nothing but the seamy and the revolting was guilty of gross distortion..........

Driving by Hart Crane, poet.

It's becoming ever more difficult to find something, or someone, to blog about who or which hasn't already been "done", often numerous times. Example, the other day I set about looking for another lesser-known poet to investigate via bio, poems and natal chart. Hart Crane came up. He seemed like an interesting, yet tragically short-lived poet; he led a life of variable excesses, gay or bi-sexual, alcoholic... then put an early end to it himself.

Nutshell version from learner.org:

Hart Crane's reputation rests primarily on his extraordinary craftsmanship and sweeping vision. In The Bridge, Crane set out to write an American epic that unified past and present, East and West, myth and reality. Crane's poetic vision, based on views that alcoholic and sexual excesses were a way to achieve a perception of unity of all things, led to self-destructive behavior, and his short, turbulent life ended in suicide.

From poets.org

Born on July 21, 1899, in Garrettsville, Ohio, Harold Hart Crane was a highly anxious and volatile child. He began writing verse in his early teenage years, and though he never attended college, read regularly on his own, digesting the works of the Elizabethan dramatists and poets Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Donne, and the nineteenth-century French poets Vildrac, Laforgue, and Rimbaud. His father, a candy manufacturer, attempted to dissuade him from a career in poetry, but Crane was determined to follow his passion to write.

Living in New York City, he associated with many important figures in literature of the time, including Allen Tate, Katherine Anne Porter, E. E. Cummings, and Jean Toomer, but his heavy drinking and chronic instability frustrated any attempts at lasting friendship. An admirer of T. S. Eliot, Crane combined the influences of European literature and traditional versification with a particularly American sensibility derived from Walt Whitman.

His major work, the book-length poem, The Bridge, expresses in ecstatic terms a vision of the historical and spiritual significance of America. Like Eliot, Crane used the landscape of the modern, industrialized city to create a powerful new symbolic literature. Hart Crane committed suicide in 1932, at the age of thirty-two, by jumping from the deck of a steamship sailing back to New York from Mexico.

Forgetfulness

Forgetfulness is like a song
That, freed from beat and measure, wanders.
Forgetfulness is like a bird whose wings are reconciled,
Outspread and motionless, --
A bird that coasts the wind unwearyingly.

Forgetfulness is rain at night,
Or an old house in a forest, -- or a child.
Forgetfulness is white, -- white as a blasted tree,
And it may stun the sybil into prophecy,
Or bury the Gods.

I can remember much forgetfulness.
Harold Hart Crane


Carmen de Boheme

Sinuously winding through the room
On smokey tongues of sweetened cigarettes, --
Plaintive yet proud the cello tones resume
The andante of smooth hopes and lost regrets.

Bright peacocks drink from flame-pots by the wall,
Just as absinthe-sipping women shiver through
With shimmering blue from the bowl in Circe's hall.
Their brown eyes blacken, and the blue drop hue.

The andante quivers with crescendo's start,
And dies on fire's birth in each man's heart.
The tapestry betrays a finger through
The slit, soft-pulling; -- -- -- and music follows cue.

There is a sweep, -- a shattering, -- a choir
Disquieting of barbarous fantasy.
The pulse is in the ears, the heart is higher,
And stretches up through mortal eyes to see.

Carmen! Akimbo arms and smouldering eyes; --
Carmen! Bestirring hope and lipping eyes; --
Carmen whirls, and music swirls and dips.
"Carmen!," comes awed from wine-hot lips.

Finale leaves in silence to replume
Bent wings, and Carmen with her flaunts through the gloom
Of whispering tapestry, brown with old fringe: --
The winers leave too, and the small lamps twinge.

Morning: and through the foggy city gate
A gypsy wagon wiggles, striving straight.
And some dream still of Carmen's mystic face, --
Yellow, pallid, like ancient lace.
Harold Hart Crane

 Data from astro.com

Having discovered that much, and a couple of his shorter, simpler poems, see above, I looked at his natal chart, noted the T-square linking Pluto/Neptune to Saturn with Mars at the apex. Then Google threw up a blog called Astrology of a Trainwreck, the blogger had noticed that Hart Crane and Ernest Hemingway shared a birthday. Here's a link to that post:

Birthday twins July 21 Ernest Hemingway and Hart Crane Genius and Suicide.



Hemingway, by the way, had Virgo rising, according to astro-databank HERE, also Moon in Capricorn.

So someone got there before me - again - and had found an interesting side issue. The post isn't dated year-wise, but appears to come from a few years ago.

Other notables from Crane's natal chart: If time of birth is reliable: Pisces rising, Sun and Venus in Cancer, and Jupiter in Scorpio - all the highly emotional water signs are represented. A strict Capricorn Moon opposing Cancerian arty Venus strikes a discordant note.

Neptune and Pluto close together in Gemini and opposite Saturn would have played a part in a whole group of people's nativities, those planets being slow movers. It's the fact that, in this case they link up to a quicker moving, so personal planet, Mars which makes the resulting network here personally significant to Crane.

Poet & Poems

Jane Hirshfield born on 24 February 1953 in New York City

"is the author of six books of poetry, several translations and two collections of essays. Her most recent volume After, on being published in both the US and UK, was nominated for the UK's T. S. Eliot Award and named one of the Washington Post's best books of 2006. She has received fellowships from the Guggenheim and Rockefeller Foundations, the Academy of American Poets and the National Endowment for the Arts; other awards include the Poetry Center Book Award, Columbia University's Translation Center Award and the Commonwealth Club of California Poetry Medal.
Her work gravitates toward the point where the philosophical, emotional, and sensual realms intersect...." See HERE.

I like to read poetry, I do not like, as much, to read about poetry. I think a poem (or a poet) can be done to death by over analysing it and over-interviewing her/him. There are numerous interviews and articles about this poet online. I'll leave it to any interested reader to Google for 'em. I tried to glean enough for a post from one or two, but soon found them a tad irritating. Sorry. I'm sure Ms Hirshfield, and all of her interviewers, would find my views equally irritating!

There could be some astro-irritability here for me - though I'm not sure from whence it could come. Her natal Sun is less than a degree from my natal Jupiter in Pisces. There are other conjunctions too her Aries Mars conjoins my Saturn (maybe this!) Her Venus is close to my Aries Moon, Her Moon and Uranus in Cancer are close to my ascendant. She doesn't have much Earth - only Jupiter in Taurus and it's close to my North Node of Moon. I think the irritation factor must be her Pisces Mercury irritating my more down-to-earth Capricorn Mercury. I'll leave it at that.

I do like this poem of Ms Hirschfield's though:

Optimism

More and more I have come to admire resilience.
Not the simple resistance of a pillow, whose foam
returns over and over to the same shape, but the sinuous
tenacity of a tree: finding the light newly blocked on one side,
it turns in another. A blind intelligence, true.
But out of such persistence arose turtles, rivers,
mitochondria, figs–all this resinous, unretractable earth.

And this one:

A Person Protests to Fate

A person protests to fate:

"The things you have caused
me most to want
are those that furthest elude me."

Fate nods.
Fate is sympathetic.

To tie the shoes, button a shirt,
are triumphs
for only the very young,
the very old.

During the long middle:

conjugating a rivet
mastering tango
training the cat to stay off the table
preserving a single moment longer than this one
continuing to wake whatever has happened the day before

and the penmanships love practices inside the body.

Mercedes de Acosta - Writer, Lesbian, Lover of the Stars.

While searching for, perhaps, a poet to feature on this February/March cuspy weekend, I came across mention of one Mercedes de Acosta. I'd never heard the name before, but read through a little of what's available about her on the net. Well...poet she was, and author of books of prose, and scriptwriter - but her gifts in those spheres must have paled in comparison to her sexual attraction - and to her own gender. She's remembered, these days, for her many passionate love affairs with some of the most celebrated and beautiful women of her generation, including Isadora Duncan, Marlene Dietrich, Eva Le Gallienne, and Greta Garbo. She was openly bisexual years before what has become known as the sexual revolution . In 1920, she married painter Abram Poole, the marriage survived for 15 years, though perhaps with husband and wife living apart for much of that time.

It is reported to have been a boast of Mercedes de Acosta that she could "get any woman from any man." I guess it could be said that Mercedes' sexual prowess was aided by her hot Latino bloodline. She was born into an affluent New York family , youngest of eight children, on 1 March 1893 in New York City. Her father, Ricardo de Acosta, was of Cuban and Spanish descent; her mother, Micaela Hernández de Alba y de Alba, was Spanish and reportedly a descendant of the Spanish Dukes of Alba. The family lived in a wealthy area of the city; the good and the great of those times were often entertained as family guests. Her sister, Rita Lydig, became a well-known, fashionable socialite.

During the 1920s, Mercedes was a well-known figure in New York's high society circles, but also in some of its lower dives - drag clubs and speakeasies. In her own words: “These were years guided by the spirit of the New. We were on fire with fire, with a passion to create and a daring to achieve.” She became a student of eastern religions, a strict vegetarian and an early feminist. Mercedes would have none of the era's uncomfortable female fashions - she quite often favoured trousers.

According to a source :

As a young child, Mercedes firmly believed she was a boy. She was raised Roman Catholic and tended toward the extremes. Mercedes played with boys, believing she was just like them, until age seven, when she realized her anatomy differed from her friends'. According to Hugo Victors, author of Loving Garbo, de Acosta recalled of that moment, "[E]verything in my young soul turned monstrous and terrible and dark." She was sent to a convent to adopt more feminine ways. She often ran away, claiming she could not be defined as either boy or girl but perhaps as both. This flexibility extended to her spirituality, whereby she proclaimed to have no belief or faith in dogma, but rather is reported as saying, "I believe in taking the essence from all religions and arriving at your own creed." Unfortunately, her confusion often led to bouts of depression.

Robert A. Schanke, Mercedes' most recent biographer, after extensive research, acknowledged that Mercedes was "flawed and imperfect, a complex woman who impaired several of her relationships and failed to achieve her professional and romantic aspirations." But the author also reveals her to have been an exceptionally lively, intelligent, and dynamic person who had many devoted friends. She was, he argues, a brave lesbian of her times and a person of integrity who remained kind and loyal to most everyone with whom she crossed paths. He suggests that the many denigrating portrayals of her may derive from the deep homophobia of her generation. (See here)

Mercedes spent her last years poor and lonely. Paying many medical bills resulting from various illnesses and surgeries, had impoverished her to the point where she'd even had to sell her diamonds. Her 1960 autobiography, Here Lies the Heart, alienated many of her friends, who claimed the book to be wildly exaggerated and even blatantly untrue.

Mercedes de Acosta died in May 1968, aged 75.

A very good website of biographer Robert Schanke has lots more detail in several sections, and many photographs.


ASTROLOGY

Born on 1 March 1893 in New York City. No time of birth is known, chart is set for 12 noon.

Pisces Sun (self) was in harmonious trine to Uranus (avant garde) in Scorpio (sex, eroticism) - a clue!

Sun also sextile Mars (the masculine), with both planets linking via quincunx (150*) to Saturn - possibly indicates an innate but scratchy relationship of a female/masculine self funnelled through Saturn (work - her writing)? Saturn in Libra, the apex of that Yod, also links harmoniously to the generational Pluto/Neptune conjunction in Gemini, combining creativity and sexiness/darkness.

What else? We can't know Moon's position without a time of birth - was it Leo or Virgo? Leo seems most fitting, but Virgo is ruled by Mercury and Mercedes was a writer. So - take your pick!

Venus, planet of love and art in Aquarius links to her avant garde nature and Venus lay in helpful sextile to Jupiter in Aries, which, being translated = a whole lot(Jupiter) of love (Venus).

Arty Farty Friendship : Leonard Baskin and Ted Hughes, The Artist and The Poet.

 Hat-tip BBC

American artist, Leonard Baskin, creator of fine woodcuts, water colours, etchings, powerful sculptures, prints and book illustration collaborated with English poet Ted Hughes to illustrate books of his poetry. The pair, born 8 years and 2 days apart, in mid-August, became firm friends - described by some writers as "soulmates" - platonic, I think. I'm concentrating on Baskin mainly here, but comparing the two natal charts could be interesting - see later in the post.

So that Ted Hughes isn't ignored completely, a poem of his from the Crow series. Ted Hughes was married to poet Sylvia Plath until her suicide. Their son also committed suicide. Hughes died in 1998.

Crow's Fall

When Crow was white he decided the sun was too white.
He decided it glared much too whitely.
He decided to attack it and defeat it.

He got his strength flush and in full glitter.
He clawed and fluffed his rage up.
He aimed his beak direct at the sun's centre.

He laughed himself to the centre of himself

And attacked.

At his battle cry trees grew suddenly old,
Shadows flattened.

But the sun brightened-
It brightened, and Crow returned charred black.

He opened his mouth but what came out was charred black.

"Up there," he managed,
"Where white is black and black is white, I won."

From a piece by Bob Duggan, HERE:

Baskin credits the fact that both he and Hughes were “crow-haunted and death-involved” as the genesis of their collaboration on "Crow". Despite coming from wildly different backgrounds, Hughes and Baskin arrived at an “affinity,” as Baskin calls it, that develops into “a relationship of presence” rather than “a relationship of influence.” Both artists are inalienably present in every work. Neither simply derives ideas from the other. Hughes imagined his crow character as a “generalized character” taking on trickster elements and other bits and pieces of mythology from all around the world. Baskin similarly saw the crow as a symbol of something despised, maybe even as an emblem of the plight of African-Americans seeking equality at the time. All of those ideas coalesced through collaboration into the illustrated poems of Crow. The illustrations, just like those Baskin later did for other collections of poems by Hughes, resist the too-common temptation to act as what Baskin derides as “visual nomenclature” for poems. Instead, they extend and illuminate the poems, standing on their own, but standing even taller for the poems they accompany.

Baskin's subject matter, in general, ranges from mythological characters, birds of prey (symbolic, to Baskin, of humankind's base instincts), self-portraits, depictions of women (often emblematic of stoical suffering), allegorical representations of death, Jewish subjects and a series on Native Americans. Baskin's interest in classical mythology and Biblical subjects manifest in his work depicting guilt and redemption, good and evil, life and death. Social consciousness and sensitivity to moral issues, a reverence for human life underline all his work. (HERE)

The Complete Prints of Leonard Baskin has an introduction by Ted Hughes - a snip from it:

This rich inwardness of Baskin's art has many components. Some of the more accessible of these, maybe, can be seen in his graphic style itself, which is so like a signature, so unique to him and so consistent, that it might well interest a graphologist. But the oddities of it hint at other sources. As if a calligraphy had been improvised from the knotted sigils and clavicles used for conjuring spirits, those bizarre scratch-marks of the arcane powers, such as we find in practical grimoires. This element of his draughtmanship is no more than a trace, but it peers from every interstice, and suggests a natural psychic proclivity, enough to attune his operation, perhaps, to certain freedoms familiar in Jewish mysticism. A passport between worlds usually kept closed to each other. It is one of the essentials of his work's power to disturb, and of it's weird beauty too.

 Cavebirds

 Man of Peace

 Sybil's Hands

 African American Subject

Re Baskins's Holocaust Memorial in Ann Arbor, Michigan

"It’s ambivalent. The figure is in some sort of misery, wrapped up entirely in himself." Baskin said the fist "portrays deep and powerful anger," the other arm is "far more felicitous, raised possibly in mercy, forgiveness, tenderness, gentleness, all of those qualities." (HERE)

Leonard Baskin died in 2000. From an NYT obituary HERE

In an art world given to changing styles and continually updated aesthetic agendas centering on abstraction, Mr. Baskin remained steadfast in his belief in the superiority of figurative art and the importance of mortality as a theme. His convictions brought him honors and important commissions, including those for the bas relief of a funeral cortege that he created for the Franklin Delano Roosevelt Memorial in Washington (see here) and an anguished, heavily draped seated cast-bronze figure, seven feet tall, for the Ann Arbor Holocaust Memorial in Michigan.

Widely read and articulate, he could be acidly funny, referring to Pop Art, for example, as "the inedible raised to the level of the unspeakable." Or he could pontificate in biblical sonorities, as in a frequently quoted statement published in Time magazine: "Our human frame, our gutted mansion, our enveloping sack of beef and ash is yet a glory. Glorious in defining our universal sodality and glorious in defining our utter uniqueness. The human figure is the image of all men and of one man. It contains all and can express all."

ASTROLOGY

Leonard Baskin born 15 August 1922 in New Brunswick, New Jersey. 12 noon chart. No birth time known.

Ted Hughes born 17 August 1930 in Mytholmroyd, UK at 1.12 AM Rated "B" - from a biography.

Born 8 years and 2 days apart, on different continents, yet it's easy to see why these two would feel an affinity.

Natal Suns were bound to be close, in Leo; not so for natal Moons, but in all probability both had natal Moon in Taurus, an artistic Moon (degree not certain for Baskin without a time of birth). Both had creative, imaginative Neptune close to Sun, in Baskin's case, conjoined; in Hughes' case, just outside a conjunction, but close in early Virgo.

Both have Mercury in Virgo and Venus in Libra - artistry and meticulousness.

Baskin has a cluster of planets in Libra, which possibly reflected a rather more balanced, less intense nature than Hughes'.

Natal Mars: these are sited opposite one another in Sagittarius (Baskin) and Gemini (Hughes). I don't see these two signs as nearly as incompatible as are some other opposite signs. The two friends, when disagreements arose, would be likely to have found easy ways to compromise.

Baskin's chart has a Yod (Finger of Fate) linking Neptune and Jupiter by sextile and both to Uranus by quincunx.
I translate that as his wide ranging creativity being manifested in both philosophical and unexpected ways.

Where's that common "darkness" though? Both men seemed keen to exhibit it in their works. I'd usually look to Pluto or Scorpio to find that kind of thing. Baskin has no planet in Scorpio, but his Pluto and Moon (if Moon degree is within orb) form a Yod with Mars at its apex. Scorpio might have been rising, I guess, but no birth time is known. Hughes had Pluto within 9 degrees of natal Jupiter; and again, no planet in Scorpio.

Their compatibility as friends is easy to see; the "dark" feeling of much of their work, not as easily found - so far.

Arty Farty Friday ~ Wm. Butler Yeats ~ The Second Coming

Irish poet William Butler Yeats was born this day,
13 June, in 1865. His natal chart and brief biography are at astro.com. William painted in words - his father, John Butler Yeats, was an artist in the more traditional sense.

Rather than concentrate on the story of W.B. Yeats, his life and loves, I'll ponder upon one of his poems. This is a poem containing several memorable phrases which tend to pop up here and there, in quotation marks, in the work of other writers, so evocative have they become.

The poem: The Second Coming, written in 1919, published in 1920. The title could imply a Christian theme, but Yeats was a mystic and occultist, not particularly impressed by organised religion, including Christianity. The poem goes deeper.

When Yeats wrote The Second Coming the world in general was in a state of shock in the aftermath of The Great War (1914-1918). His own, Irish world, was in the throes of upheaval as Irish revolutionaries, many of whom he counted as friends and/or lovers, attempted to rid Ireland of centuries of British rule. Those facts indicate the poet's state of mind and emotions as he wrote. This poem, though, can be enjoyed like a painting from which each viewer draws a slightly different meaning, or like some modern song lyrics which, on the surface, seem nonsensical, but from which each listener is able to find their own meaning.

THE SECOND COMING

Turning and turning in the widening gyre
The falcon cannot hear the falconer;
Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold;
Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,
The blood-dimmed tide is loosed, and everywhere
The ceremony of innocence is drowned;
The best lack all conviction, while the worst
Are full of passionate intensity.

Surely some revelation is at hand;
Surely the Second Coming is at hand.
The Second Coming! Hardly are those words out
When a vast image out of Spiritus Mundi
Troubles my sight: somewhere in sands of the desert
A shape with lion body and the head of a man,
A gaze blank and pitiless as the sun,
Is moving its slow thighs, while all about it
Reel shadows of the indignant desert birds.
The darkness drops again; but now I know
That twenty centuries of stony sleep
Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,
And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,
Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?

The gyre, at the heart of this poem refers to something those keen on astrology's principles understand well - cycles - here further expanded to the form of an ever-widening sprial. The gyre reaches a point wide enough that a symbolic falcon flies beyond control of its keeper and becomes destabilised. Astrology's 2,100-year Ages fit the gyre imagery, I think.

Yeats had lived through the opening of the 20th century - 2,000 years from the birth of Christ - and speculated that a new "coming", or awakening, or major change of some kind, was to be expected, though not an exact repeat of the last one. I understand that Yeats' book A Vision details his beliefs in this direction.

"Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold": each generation might see a different reference there. Things going too far....too much excess, too much progress, too much control, too much technology, more and more until..... "mere anarchy" emerges (the word 'mere' is used here in its ancient meaning of pure and unadulterated).

"The best lack all conviction, while the worst are full of passionate intensity." We can all relate those words to something familiar today, to apathetic and passive citizens as against the overly intense on both sides of the political divide, for instance.

The second part of the poem proceeds to speculate "what next then?" The poet has a vision of what seems like the Sphinx in the desert, birds wheeling overhead, but representing what? Life as it was lived before Christ - a pagan world? Then darkness fell as Christianity emerged to bring about change? 2,000 years on Yeats expected another "coming", some as yet unknown event or "beast" to emerge and change things yet again, as Christ's coming had changed things last time around.

The "slouching" imagery indicates to me a slow, murky advance with no glorious overtures. I can easily identify that something coming, advancing slowly, while the best of us lack all conviction, and the worst are full of passionate intensity; something which will, inevitably, change things for us all.

See? Time has given the poem a potential new meaning, something which Yeats could not have envisioned in detail. An original meaning is still there, but exists a little further back on the loop of that ever-widening gyre. As the gyre continues to widen still further, scenes change.

Arty Farty Friday ~ George William Russell aka Æ, Irish poet, mystic, painter.

Born this week in 1867, Irish poet, mystic, writer and painter, George William Russell, otherwise known by his chosen pseudonym AE (properly written Æ, but I cannot type it that way). He was part of the Irish literary renaissance of the late 19th and early 20th centuries.

George Wm Russell was born in Lurgan, County Armagh, in what is now Northern Ireland aka Ulster, on April 10, 1867. His family moved to Dublin in 1877, where Russell attended the Metropolitan School of Art. He met William Butler Yeats, and a chance reading of the Upanishads, along with a friendship with Charles Johnston, led Russell to a deeper study of the Upanishads and the Bhagavad Gita. Russell was then drawn into Theosophical circles through Johnston and Yeats. He later met Mohini Chatterji This acquaintance encouraged Russell to pursue his study of Indian philosophy and literature further. In 1890 he gave up Art School, formally joined the Theosophical Society and dedicated the next seven years to pursuing 'the path of mysticism'. Hindu and Buddhist philosophy influenced his poetry and painting, though he was also inspired by his own visions and natural mysticism.

To make a living he worked, at various times, in a brewery, a draper's accounts office, and eventually became editor of The Irish Homestead (1902-23) and The Irish Statesman (1923-30). Collections of his verse were published in the late 19th century.

Russell died of cancer in Bournemouth, England, on July 17, 1935; his body was returned to Ireland for burial.

Sources: http://www.byzant.com/mystical/biography/Biographies.aspx?id=10
http://www.open.ac.uk/researchprojects/makingbritain/content/george-russell-ae

Some of Russell's own words from Preface to his book: Imagination and Reveries:

......My temperament would only allow me to be happy when I was working at art. My conscience would not let me have peace unless I worked with other Irishmen at the reconstruction of Irish life. Birth in Ireland gave me a bias towards Irish nationalism, while the spirit which inhabits my body told me the politics of eternity ought to be my only concern, and that all other races equally with my own were children of the Great King. To aid in movements one must be orthodox. My desire to help prompted agreement, while my intellect was always heretical. I had written out of every mood, and could not retain any mood for long. If I advocated a national ideal I felt immediately I could make an equal plea for more cosmopolitan and universal ideas. I have observed my intuitions wherever they drew me, for I felt that the Light within us knows better than any other the need and the way. So I have no book on one theme, and the only unity which connects what is here written is a common origin. The reader must try a balance between the contraries which exist here as they exist in us all, as they exist and are harmonized in that multitudinous meditation which is the universe.—A.E.

His political leanings are made clear in a communication with the Irish Times on 7 October 1913 relating to the lockout of around 20,000 workers during the Dublin Lockout, a major industrial dispute with 300 employers in Dublin, the Irish capital. Part of his letter, included here because.....well, don't these words still echo with relevance to 2014?

The Dublin Lockout 1913

Sirs, I address this warning to you, the aristocracy of industry in this city, because, like all aristocracies, you tend to grow blind in long authority, and to be unaware that you and your class and its every action are being considered and judged day by day by those who have power to shake or overturn the whole social order, and whose restlessness in poverty today is making our industrial civilisation stir like a quaking bog. .. That you are an uncultivated class was obvious from recent utterances of some of you upon art. That you are incompetent men in the sphere in which you arrogate imperial powers is certain, because for many years, long before the present uprising of labour, your enterprises have been dwindling in the regard of investors, and this while you have carried them on in the cheapest labour market in these islands, with a labour reserve always hungry and ready to accept any pittance. You are bad citizens, for we rarely, if ever, hear of the wealthy among you endowing your city with munificent gifts, which it is the pride of merchant princes in other cities to offer, and Irishmen not of your city who offer to supply the wants left by your lack of generosity are met with derision and abuse. .. The conception of yourselves as altogether virtuous and wronged is, I assure you, not at all the one which onlookers hold of you. No doubt, you have rights on your side. No doubt, some of you suffered without just cause. But nothing which has been done to you cries aloud to Heaven for condemnation as your own actions. Let me show you how it seems to those who have followed critically the dispute, trying to weigh in a balance the rights and wrongs. You were within the rights society allows you when you locked out your men and insisted on the fixing of some principle to adjust your future relations with labour when the policy of labour made it impossible for some of you to carry on your enterprises. Labour desired the fixing of some such principle as much as you did. But, having once decided on such a step, knowing how many thousands of men, women, and children, nearly one third of the population of this city, would be affected, you should not have let one day have passed without unremitting endeavours to find a solution of the problem. ... you determined deliberately, in cold anger, to starve out one third of the population of the city, to break the manhood of the men by the sight of the suffering of their wives and the hunger of their children. ...You insolently demanded of those men who were members of a trade union that they should resign from that union; and from those who were not members, you insisted on a vow that they would never join it. Your insolence and ignorance of the rights conceded to workers universally in the modern world were incredible, and as great as your inhumanity............................

Read more of it at
http://www.lissadellhouse.com/exhibitions.html

Natal chart set for 12 noon, as no birth time is known.
George Wm Russell, born in Lurgan, County Armagh, Northern Ireland, UK,
on April 10, 1867.

Nutshell Notes: Aries Sun conjunct Neptune (just!) what more do we need to signify a mystically-inclined individual, poet and writer? Alright then - Venus, planet of the arts in Pisces (ruled by Neptune) conjunct (just) Jupiter (philosophy, religion) in late Aquarius. If that's not enough, how about Uranus lying, quite possibly, conjunct natal Moon (cannot be sure without a time of birth) - Uranus planet of the unusual and unexpected.

There's a Grand Trine in Water (emotions) signs linking Mercury (the writer) in Pisces, to Mars and Saturn in Cancer and Scorpio, two signs which can slightly soften the usually harder "feel" of Mars and Saturn.

Examples of AE's paintings:

On his trips to Donegal, AE very often retired to his so-called ‘Fairy House’, a tiny building in the woods overlooking Sheephaven Bay. Scenes of dancing and leisure are common in his oeuvre. The painting has the whimsical quality, characteristic of much of his work.

The prominence of children in AE’s pictures is far from incidental. Their blithe energy and imagination point to a freedom of spirit consistent with the visions the artist had developed from Theosophy, Irish mythology, memory and waking dreams. In articles in the Irish Statesman, AE lamented the stagnation that he observed in rural Ireland, brought about by a lack of amenities and emigration, but saw promise in young people. AE was au fait with Modernist trends, and convinced of the veracity of his own expression.

(See HERE)

Fairies in a Wood

 Bathers

 The Hour of Twilight

 Shining Shallows

 Jumping Rope

Sidhe

 Mystical Figures